Diversity of NEC hardware, Rakuten Symphony software
UK telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) has announced that its first Open radio access networks (Open RANs) are now running in the East Midlands county of Northamptonshire. They were installed by Japanese systems integrators NEC Corporation and Rakuten Symphony, after they completed successful trials of the installations in their labs in India and Hounslow. The UK government has called on telcos to diversify their telecom supply chains as the omnipresence of kit from Chinese state backed vendors, notably Huawei, is seen as a possible vulnerability in critical national infrastructure.
An NEC release said the Open RAN system of macro-sites comprised ‘multi-vendors’ and is notable for being in one of the telco’s ‘brownfield’ networks. VMO2 grew rapidly in the UK by acquisition of cable companies and telcos and has faced considerable challenges with systems integration, as aggregated many incompatible silos of data, stored on systems that didn’t recognise each other’s computing customs. NEC claimed that the new Open RAN is ‘baselined on the existing Telco Cloud supply chain to maximise future synergies’, which might suggest that it feels confident that compatibility will not be an issue.
The new brownfield deployment is definitely now fit to handle commercial traffic, according to systems integrator NEC. However the release did not specify whether the number of vendors was more than two and suggests that NEC married the communications hardware into an infrastructure layer, while Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN software, edge cloud, radio management and operations expertise provided the software conjugation. NEC claimed the VMO2 UK macro-sites will be models of ‘vendor diversity and innovation’.
The Open RAN macro-sites went live after extensive testing at NEC and Rakuten Symphony’s labs in India and NEC’s Global Open RAN Centre of Excellence lab in Ruislip, London. The latter facility follows NEC’s design quality assurance process for multi-vendor systems integration, which has to be tested and validated before any field deployment.
The successful activation of Virgin Media O2’s first UK macro-sites embodies the potential of the multi-vendor Open RAN model, according to Jeanie York, VMO2’s Chief Technology Officer. “We are strong believers in the power of diverse Open RAN ecosystems and NEC shares our view.”
The VMO2 macro-sites comprise an ecosystem of industry leaders, said Mayuko Tatewaki, Senior Vice President at NEC, without detailing which other vendor’s kit had to be integrated. The quote from Rabih Dabboussi, Rakuten Symphony’s Chief Business Officer, suggests that only NEC hardware and Rakuten software were involved.
“Rakuten Symphony and NEC have complementary solutions providing advanced and highly automated Open RAN, edge cloud and proven operational systems as this deployment for Virgin Media O2 demonstrates,” said Dabboussi. “Rakuten Symphony’s Open RAN software and NEC’s radios and system integration validate the transformative potential of Open RAN technology.”