OTTAWA — Ericsson announced today it has established the Ericsson Open Lab, a new space located in Ottawa, to enable collaboration and innovation with its Cloud RAN customers and ecosystem partners to drive virtualized 5G radio access network (RAN) technologies.
Ericsson Open Lab (above) is co-located with the company’s Cloud RAN expertise at Ericsson’s R&D site in Ottawa, and is also accessible virtually to customers globally.
The launch of Open Lab follows Ericsson’s announcement of its Cloud RAN product portfolio development. It will enable further development of Ericsson Cloud RAN solutions on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, says the company’s press release. Ericsson is Rogers Communications primary tech vendor and is also part of the 5G plans of Bell, Telus and Xplornet.
“Ericsson Open Lab enables fast and interactive collaboration that delivers innovation to complement existing RAN solutions. Ericsson Open Lab also aims to help service providers pursue and realize new deployment and 5G use case scenarios, as well as create opportunities to increase automation and reduce manual intervention. The lab offers space to further explore Open RAN technologies, including aspects such as virtualization, management, and orchestration,” reads the press release.
Ericsson says collaboration at the facility is not limited to its own technology, as the company said it will also seek to foster greater co-operation in areas such as machine learning, network automation and optimization with communications service providers and industry partners. These service providers include KDDI, Ooredoo, Orange, Softbank Corp, Turkcell and ecosystem partners such as Intel, NVIDIA, Red Hat and Wind River. Additional customers and partners will be engaged as Cloud RAN network requirements evolve, enabling new collaborative activities in the Open Lab, says the press release.
“At the Ottawa site, 100MHz of indoor mid-band spectrum and 60MHz of indoor/outdoor mid-band spectrum is available for testing and co-creation activities. This enables customers and partners to create and test Cloud RAN capabilities based on their own spectral holdings and use case requirements across indoor and outdoor networks,” says the release.
“We have created this collaboration to develop architectures and common operating standards that complement existing 5G ready technology. This initiative will help to test the limits of 5G connectivity, working closely with operators and enterprise customers globally, as the industry continues to adopt more open architectures,” said Fredrik Jejdling, executive vice-president and head of business area networks at Ericsson, in the release.
For more, please click here.
Image supplied by Ericsson.
