Open RAN Explained

Ericsson’s commitment to openness

For the past 40 years, Ericsson has supported the evolution of openness and interoperability in mobile telecoms. A technology leader with R&D in standards, patents and interoperability, Ericsson was one of the driving forces of 3GPP. The 3GPP specifications are the global standards for 8 billion mobile devices when it comes to seamless calling and connectivity over networks anywhere in the world. Ericsson also plays an active role in shaping specifications as part of the O-RAN Alliance, learning the capabilities and limitations of new network technologies and testing them together with communication service provider customers and partners. We believe that innovations like Cloud RAN can be a bridging technology to greater openness by bringing some of the benefits of cloud-scale economic in RAN and deployment flexibility.

What is Open RAN?

The Radio Access Network (RAN) provides the critical technology to connect users, including mobile phones or enterprises, to the mobile network over radio waves. It also acts as a bridge to access all the key applications on the web.

Current RAN technology is provided as a hardware and software integrated platform. The ambition for Open RAN is to create a multi-supplier RAN solution that allows for the separation - or disaggregation - between hardware and software with open interfaces and virtualisation, hosting software that controls and updates networks in the cloud. The promised benefits include supply chain diversity, solution flexibility, and new capabilities leading to increased competition and further innovation.

The O-RAN Alliance (O-RAN) is a group that is defining specifications for radio access networks. It is a global alliance founded in 2018 and it is now comprised of close to 30 operators and more than 200 vendor companies. The O-RAN Alliance is a relatively new organization that took the 3GPP standards work as its baseline and set out to create extensions specifically for the RAN. The goals are to provide detailed blueprints for how to build the RAN solution enabling parts from different vendors, including mechanisms for enabling artificial intelligence and machine learning for more efficient network management and orchestration.

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