Last week, ONF and Deutsche Telekom (DT) hosted a live event premiering the launch of the first fully disaggregated open RAN 5G field trial. The Trial itself interconnected components from 8+ vendors with ONF’s SD-RAN open source RAN Intelligent Controller (nRT-RIC), leveraging the O-RAN architecture.
Alex Choi gave a great overview of DT’s ambitions for open RAN, including DT’s progress towards their 2023 targets.
Alex Choi
SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom
& Founding Board Member at the O-RAN Alliance
A video of the live trial at DT's Digital Innovation Arena in Berlin shows the deployment in action:
DT SD-RAN Deployment in Action
Additional talks by Rüdiger Kunze (DT), as well as Oguz Sunay and Saurav Das (ONF) each covered a different aspect of the trial deployment, from industry trends and opportunities to technical specifics of SD-RAN and the deployment itself.
ONF's SD-RAN Project Architecture & Insights
Collaborating vendors (AirHop Communications, Facebook, Intel, Radisys, and Wiwynn) each shared detailed presentations on their specific engagement in the trial, and also participated in a panel session discussing the various challenges and lessons learned from the experience. A second panel focused on operator strategies for open RAN deployment, and featured leaders from AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, and the O-RAN Alliance.
Vendor Panel Operator Panel
This has been a tremendous achievement, congratulations to all the collaborators. This trial is just the start. The plan is for the trial to continue to be extended over the next year, with new components (RU, DU, CU), new xApps and new use cases to be added.
To learn more or to join the community, check out ONF's SD-RAN project web page.
