O2 has announced an open radio access network (O-RAN) project to broaden its number of network infrastructure partners.
This is said to be particularly useful for coverage in hard to reach rural locations – such as an area with a very small population – or where a sharing model is more cost effective such as dense urban locations where large numbers of small cells are required.
O2 is working with Mavenir, Dense Air and Wave Mobile to implement O-RAN in London and other UK locations. The company expects commercial deployment of O-RAN to pick up pace over next 18-24 months.
With Mavenir, O2 will increase coverage and capacity in London, providing enhanced mobile connectivity in busy areas like stadiums and shopping centres.
Dense Air will work with the provider at Millbrook to deploy both 4G and 5G networks over an O-RAN solution. O2 works with Millbrook Proving Ground as the public and private network provider of 5G connectivity for the testing and development of CAV technology.
Coverage solutions are being developed with Wave Mobile whose current O-RAN network is active on several sites across the UK including Woldingham, Surrey that carries mobile traffic for O2 customers. The provider suggests this could be expanded to provide community based mobile services in ‘not spots’.
Brendan O’Reilly, CTO of O2 said: “By opening up our radio access network to smaller vendors, and as we look towards wider adoption of 5G, O-RAN will be part of the solution to bring the latest connectivity to more people around the country”.
Paul Senior, CEO of Dense Air said: “Dense Air and Airspan Networks, our technology partner, have built a unique hyper-dense pervasive 4G and 5G O-RAN based solution at Millbrook. The O-RAN deployment which utilises over 70 radio nodes, 19km Fibre and mmWave front haul delivers network capacity at a scale never seen before at any Proving Ground, allowing the validation of future CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle ) use cases”.
Source: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/o2-open-radio-access-network-increased-4-5g-coverage-2020-01/