NTT Docomo says it will have a competitive open RAN (O-RAN) solution on the market by the end of the year.

The Japanese telco is working with a dozen vendors to develop a verified multi-vendor O-RAN solution that it hopes will ease many of the headaches telcos have faced in deploying the new architecture.

It aims to carve out a role for itself as a bridge between vendors and operators, earlier this year announcing its new Orex (Open RAN Ecosystem Experience) brand that will carry out testing and verification of O-RAN gear.

Figure 1: The Japanese telco is pitching open RAN wares to other operators.
(Source: NTT Docomo)

Sadayuki Abeta, head of Open RAN solutions for Docomo, says the company is leveraging its pioneering experience in LTE when it led the specification of some key interfaces that then allowed it to run a multi-vendor 4G network.

Under Orex it has signed up five telco partners – KT Corp, Vodafone Group, Smart Communications, Dish Wireless and Singtel. Abeta says other operators are involved but can't yet be named.

He said Orex has grown out of the experience with early efforts of multi-vendor O-RAN in 2021.

"We worked with multiple vendors to create some vRAN systems, but the performance was not competitive with incumbent vendors at that time," he said.

Real open network

"So we created Orex to realize competitive performance and a real open network," Abeta said.

The performance benchmarks include both capacity and power consumption, as well as development of some operations simplification like lifecycle management, Abeta said.

Among the vendors involved are hardware providers Dell and HPE, chip firms Nvidia and Intel, platform players Wind River and Red Hat, and Mavenir, Fujitsu and NEC for software.

"Now it's almost complete, but not commercially available yet. We are targeting later this year," Abeta said.

The commercial release will have to wait until the operators complete their trials, he said.

The business case for Orex is straightforward enough.

"If we integrate the solution for a single operator, it's clearly costly," Abeta said. "But if we can share the network integration cost among the operators, we can divide the cost by the number of operators.

"It's a business. We are selling that solution to the operators."

Related posts:

— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading