NTT DOCOMO has announced that Hewlett Packard Japan has joined the company’s 5G Open RAN Ecosystem to help expand Open RAN worldwide.
DOCOMO, which has long been promoting Open RAN, was the world’s first company to introduce open RAN on a practical basis over a commercial 5G network. DOCOMO and its partners in the Ecosystem are working to commercialize highly flexible and scalable virtualized RAN (vRAN) for open RAN, including for sale to telecom carriers outside Japan.
Compared to current vRAN, the Ecosystem hopes to triple both transmission speeds and the number of operable base-station cells and more than halve power consumption within the current fiscal year ending in March 2022. The testing of advanced vRAN is now under way. Hewlett Packard Japan will support these initiatives with its well-proven infrastructure solutions, aiming to help the Ecosystem to respond more flexibly to the needs of overseas telecom carriers.
Looking ahead, DOCOMO plans to establish a lab at its R&D center in Yokosuka, Japan for the dual purposes of verifying vRAN and serving as a testing site available remotely and freely to overseas carriers by the end of March 2022.
Through this and other measures, DOCOMO aims to deepen ties with an expanding range of stakeholders as well as overseas carriers to support the establishment of technologies and know-how for the early adoption of open networks, especially O-RAN and vRAN, that are capable of responding flexibly and promptly to diversifying needs.
