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    Home5G & BeyondWhat are the lessons for Africa in Middle East consortium's ORAN strategy?

    What are the lessons for Africa in Middle East consortium’s ORAN strategy?

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    New whitepaper praises Zain du attitude of vendors

    The Middle East Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) consortium has published its first open RAN whitepaper with a focus on brownfield deployment opportunities and challenges. The challenges of maintaining momentum while ensuring diversity and inclusion have a universal theme and the culture of collaboration could be a lesson for African telcos confronting the same questions. Though it is hardly a like for like comparison there are some parallels. The consortium signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for ORAN collaboration in 2021. Participants included Zain, e& the Etisalat Group, stc, du from Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC), Mobily, Batelco and Omantel.

    The consortium launched the first regional community lab earlier this year, following the signing of the Open RAN MoU last year. The move will expedite the testing and implementation of Open RAN systems in their networks to support the early adoption and development of a robust regional ICT ecosystem, said a report in the Kuwait Times. “With today’s announcement, we reach yet another step towards solidifying this partnership between the region’s top ICT leaders,” said Zain Group Chief Technical Officer Nawaf Al-Gharabally. “The shared knowledge and experiences in this whitepaper will provide an invaluable resource that sets a clear path to drive innovation for the ICT sector across the Middle East.”

    The launch of the first ORAN whitepaper signals the entry into a new era of operators’ collaboration in the Middle East to catalyse the development of Open Network technologies. The plan is to diversify technology growth in the Gulf, bring services to the local market quicker and prioritise strategically important technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI). The installing ORAN systems should promote flexibility, invention and operational efficiency. In the whitepaper, the consortium elaborated on the challenges and opportunities for brownfield mobile network operators. They highlighted the current efforts done by the consortium members ranging from field trials, lab establishments, vendor interactions and organisations engagements to verify and explore the ecosystem and readiness, in addition to navigating through the variable Open RAN use cases.

    The Open RAN Consortium confirms the importance to deploy Open RAN across their footprint, providing an opportunity for traditional as well as new entrants RAN vendors to adopt open interfaces, software and hardware to build more agile and flexible mobile networks in the 5G and 4G era. It brings the opportunity to new entrants to create value in RAN business through innovation, influencing the telco equipment business to become more competitive to support current requirements of telco and more importantly the future requirements (like 6G) and offering choices to mobile operators to achieve innovative solutions and cost efficiencies in RAN deployments.