Juniper Networks and Turk Telekom Group completed a new technology and commercial partnership to accelerate innovation in support of the Open RAN (Open Radio Access Network) 5G ecosystem. The partnership comprises an exclusive global licensing deal with Netsia, a subsidiary of Turk Telekom Group company Argela in the US, to transfer its Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) technology to Juniper, including related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products that integrate with RIC.
It also covers the permanent transfer of technical domain experts from Netsia to Juniper in support of RIC’s integration into Juniper’s product portfolio. Turk Telekom will also purchase Juniper products to support its next-generation Open RAN and 5G deployment. This will include an initial proof-of-concept project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Juniper’s broader portfolio.
Coupled with Juniper’s existing domain orchestration portfolio (NorthStar in the transport domain and Contrail in the data centre domain), the innovations resulting from this agreement will further extend Juniper’s network slicing functionalities across the radio, transport and telco cloud domains. It paves the way for Juniper to ultimately offer a truly cloud-native, scalable platform with network slicing and orchestration across next-generation access, IP transport and core networks, the company said. This will lay the foundation for service providers to deliver assured service experience for thousands of applications based on a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, multi-domain and any-access infrastructure, opening up new monetisation and innovation opportunities.
Juniper and Netsia are both active members of the O-RAN Alliance. The agreement between the two organisations is designed to bring to market open, intelligent and secure RAN products that will help democratise radio access in the spirit of the Open RAN philosophy, they said.
