Altiostar today announced that in cooperation with SK Telecom, the largest mobile operator in Korea, it has successfully completed a field trial of its vRAN technology in Bundang, Korea. During this field trial, performance and capacity improvement with key LTE-A features such as carrier aggregation, uplink CoMP were validated. The trial utilized SK Telecom’s existing transport network.
Altiostar’s field-proven vRAN solution is the virtualized RAN solution with flexible IP/Ethernet Fronthaul and provides all the benefits of C-RAN (Centralized RAN/Cloud RAN) without increased investments on transport infrastructure or frequency spectrum.
With Altiostar’s vRAN, service providers can maximize the potential of their spectrum and lower operational costs with a simplified network design through network-wide inter-site coordination capability for LTE-Advanced features. In addition, Altiostar’s vRAN also integrates Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) to improve the mobile subscriber’s Quality of Experience (QoE), reduce churn and enable new revenue streams via open API interface.
Altiostar’s vRAN implements an innovative functional split that allows baseband functions to run as virtual network functions (VNF) on COTS hardware at data centers, thereby bringing the benefits of cloud infrastructure such as resource pooling, auto-scaling, auto-recovery and seamless session migration to radio access networks.
Altiostar also announced successful collaboration with SK Telecom to provide Software Defined RAN (SDRAN) solution. The solution is based on SK Telecom’s SDRAN Remote Radio Unit (RRU), which was developed in collaboration with SK Telesys and Altiostar’s Open vRAN Development Platform. The SDRAN RRU is fully-managed from Altiostar Element Management System (EMS) and supports all of the basic and advanced LTE features such as inter-site carrier aggregation, Uplink CoMP (Coordinated Multipoint) and more.
This collaboration successfully establishes the feasibility of an “open” RAN model where the RAN hardware such as RRUs and COTS servers can be purchased by mobile network operators independent of baseband software. Representing a new business approach in the RAN market, this open procurement model provides operators’ tremendous flexibility in choosing best of breed hardware platforms for their RAN while reducing costs significantly.
Altiostar’s Open vRAN Development Platform includes all of the RAN software, virtual baseband unit (vBBU) and drivers needed for any RAN equipment manufacturer to integrate their RRUs with an established vRAN solution in a short period of time. Also, with this approach, mobile operators can deploy vRAN on their existing infrastructure, making use of their existing, deployed RRUs, thereby reducing development time, risk and cost.
“This collaboration with Altiostar and SK Telesys establishes feasibility of SDRAN, a concept pioneered by SKT to bring about innovation & increased competition in RAN eco-system and help operators efficiently manage network resources and deliver more services to customers while reducing costs,” said Jin-hyo Park, SVP, Head of Network Technology R&D center, SK Telecom.
Myoung Hoon Kang, Vice President, Head of R&D Division, SK Telesys said, “SDRAN architecture opens up the RAN eco-system and provides opportunity to specialist radio companies like SK Telesys to provide innovative RRUs to the operators in cost effective manner.”
“With Altiostar vRAN, mobile operators can unleash the full potential of their existing spectrum and cell sites, ready their network for 5G and receive a significant return on investment when compared to traditional C-RAN technologies,” said Ashraf Dahod, President and Chief Executive Officer, Altiostar. “We are pleased to collaborate with SK Telecom and provide them with our vRAN technology so that we can customize a solution to meet the capacity and data consumption needs of the Korean telecommunications market.”
Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/altiostar-sk-telecom-implement-virtualized-134500809.html
