Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Mobile operators issue next Open RAN technical priorities

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone  published Release 3 of their technical priorities for Open RAN. The document is meant to provide guidance to the RAN vendor community so as to help accelerate the rollout of Open RAN solutions in Europe. The priorities listed are intended to act as an input into TIP’s Open RAN Release Framework, which can then be developed with the industry at large to create requirements that can potentially be used as the basis for certification.

Release 3 is primarily focused on developing further requirements on SMO and RIC. Additional clarifications are listed for Cloud Infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU and O-RU. Moreover, this new release focuses in more detail on security topics and various challenges introduced by the disaggregation promoted by the O-RAN architecture. In particular, the security requirements are now contained within a dedicated section of the MoU Technical Priorities document. Energy efficiency (EE) topics were also analyzed in more detail, with new requirements identified in various streams, for example, Cloud Infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU, RIC use cases and RAN features.

  • Release 1 (June 2021) focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multi-vendor RAN.
  • Release 2 (March 2022) mainly focused on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, addressing also the energy efficiency goals and targets to support sustainable Open RAN.

The mobile operators note that this work is not intended to represent any alignment on procurement / product selection processes of individual signatories.

https://www.telekom.com/en/company/details/open-ran-technical-priorities-release-3-published-1032698