Telefonica and NEC have further strengthened their existing collaboration in the Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) space, announcing an agreement to conduct pre-commercial trials in the operator's four core markets of Spain, Germany, the UK and Brazil. Following what the partners described as successful tests at Telefonica Germany and O2 UK, NEC will now serve as the prime system integrator to implement and conduct trials of multi-vendor-based Open RAN solutions with the Telefonica group's four local operating companies with a view to launching the technology for commercial use in a total of at least 800 sites starting in 2022.
The Open RAN system is comprised of NEC’s own products as well as software and hardware products from trusted industry partners. NEC said its open 5G massive MIMO (mMIMO) radio units (RU) with advanced beamforming will be a part of the ecosystem and its Global Open RAN Centre of Excellence (CoE) in the UK will lead the integration and interoperability validation of the multi-vendor mix.
Telefonica and NEC will also collaborate in validating and implementing cutting-edge Open RAN technologies and various use cases at the newly established Telefonica Technology and Automation Lab in Madrid. The use cases include those built on AI-driven Radio Intelligent Controllers (RIC) for RAN optimisation, service lifecycle automation based on Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), testing and deployment automation in accordance with the operator’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) framework, as well as power savings optimisation.
Telefonica is one of the major European operators that signed an Open RAN MoU earlier this year, committing to the implementation and deployment of Open RAN systems aimed at building more flexible, efficient and secure mobile networks in the 5G era. The company has a target of reaching 50 percent radio network growth based on Open RAN by 2025.
