Accessible virtually to global customers, the Ericsson Open Lab is co-located with the company’s Cloud RAN expertise at Ericsson’s R&D site in Ottawa. Its aim is to enable fast and interactive collaboration that delivers innovation to complement existing RAN solutions, to help service providers pursue new deployment and 5G use case scenarios, and to create opportunities for increased automation.
Ericsson Open Lab collaboration is not limited to Ericsson cloud-native infrastructure technology and RAN software advancements on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and acceleration hardware.
It also seeks to foster cooperation in areas such as machine learning, network automation and optimisation with communications service providers and industry partners. These include KDDI, Ooredoo, Orange, Softbank Corp, Turkcell, Intel, NVIDIA, Red Hat and Wind River.
“Open technology underpins the modern mobile miracle, which connects more than eight billion devices today with one set of global operating standards,” said Fredrik Jejdling, executive VP and head of business area networks at Ericsson.
“We have created this collaboration to develop architectures and common operating standards that complement existing 5G ready technology. This initiative will help to test the limits of 5G connectivity, working closely with operators and enterprise customers globally, as the industry continues to adopt more open architectures.”
At the Ottawa site, 100MHz of indoor mid-band spectrum and 60MHz of indoor/outdoor mid-band spectrum is available for testing and co-creation activities. This enables customers and partners to create and test Cloud RAN capabilities based on their own spectral holdings and use case requirements across indoor and outdoor networks.
The initiative also supports Ericsson’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) approach to Cloud RAN technology development, ensuring seamless integration of new features. The Open Lab follows Ericsson's announcement of its Cloud RAN product portfolio development, enabling further development of Ericsson Cloud RAN solutions on COTS hardware and bringing flexibility to customer networks.