Fujitsu adds to TIP's Open RAN efforts

• Ecosystem to benefit from vendor's O-RAN compliant multi-band 5G radios
• Follows Fujitsu's contribution to open optical networking PoC
• TIP subgroup pushes ahead with automated orchestration, management requirements

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP)'s Open RAN Project Group received a boost this week in the form of new multi-band 5G radios courtesy of Fujitsu.

The O-RAN compliant, dual-band and tri-band equipment comes with an open interface radio unit (RU) and new features optimised for wideband signal transmission, including new amplifier technology and an algorithm designed to limit distortion. They have been self-certified by Fujitsu and listed on TIP's Exchange marketplace.

"Fujitsu's contributions to the TIP OpenRAN project group and its commitment to self-certification of its products according to the requirements of operators within the Project Group are an important part of our efforts to continually improve the performance of the RAN through innovation, automation and competition," said TIP's chief engineer David Hutton.

"Availability of Open RAN-compliant radios is key to enabling service providers to quickly and efficiently build out tomorrow's 5G networks," added Femi Adeyemi, head of the wireless business unit at Fujitsu Network Communications.

The announcement comes a week after TIP provided a concise update on Open RAN's progress. Highlights included commitments to TIP's Open RAN efforts from the likes of Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, Orange, TIM, Indosat Ooredoo and Vodafone.

TIP also hailed March's launch of the OpenRAN Orchestration and Management Automation (ROMA) subgroup. Led by Telefónica, T-Mobile US and Vodafone, ROMA hopes to aggregate operators' requirements on Open RAN orchestration and lifecycle management automation. Once compiled, they will be made available to OEMs to help them develop products that meet those requirements. So far more than 40 TIP members have signed up to ROMA, including the likes of Amdocs, Mavenir and Robin.io.

Looking more broadly at the Open RAN market, TIP cited statistics from Dell'Oro that said cumulative Open RAN investments are on course to reach $10 billion between 2020 and 2025.

Meanwhile, Fujitsu's work with TIP is not just limited to Open RAN.

In June, as part of TIP's Converged Architectures for Network Disaggregation and Integration (CANDI) project group, Fujitsu helped to demonstrate open optical network control. It is part of TIP's effort to usher in open source, modular optical hardware products that can be controlled by software. In the demonstration, Fujitsu's Virtuora network controller enabled multi-vendor SDN control across a partially disaggregated open line system (OLS).

Francois Lafontaine, vice president and head of software at Fujitsu Network Communications said at the time that the demonstration was a step towards "enabling operators to achieve greater vendor diversity and efficiencies in their optical networks."

Indeed, and one would assume that if that broader diversity means that Fujitsu wins more business from telcos, so much the better.