GSMA and O-RAN Alliance announce 5G Collaboration

The GSMA will support the O-RAN Alliance's efforts to accelerate the adoption of Open Radio Access Network (RAN) products and solutions that take advantage of new open virtualised architectures, software and hardware.

The organisations announced a collaboration to harmonise the open networking ecosystem and agree on an industry roadmap for network solutions, thereby making access networks as open and flexible as possible for new market entrants.

In its latest Mobile Economy Report, the GSMA predicts that operators will invest more than a trillion dollars over the next five years globally to serve both consumer and enterprise customers, 80 per cent of which will be on 5G networks.

“When 5G reaches its potential, it will become the first generation of mobile networks to have a bigger impact on enterprises than consumers,” said Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA. “In the enterprise sector alone, we forecast $700 billion worth of economic value to be created by the 5G opportunity. The growth of the open networking ecosystem will be essential to meeting enterprise coverage and services needs in the 5G era.”

The GSMA and O-RAN ALLIANCE collaboration complements the recently announced interworking between the GSMA and Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and the O-RAN ALLIANCE and TIP. The goal for these collaborations is to help avoid fragmentation and accelerate the successful evolution of the industry towards a more intelligent, open, virtualised and fully interoperable RAN.