O-RAN ALLIANCE Announces New Board Member and Introduces Minimum Viable Plan to Expedite the Delivery of Essential O-RAN Functions

Bonn/Germany, March 16, 2021 – As of February 23, 2021, the O-RAN ALLIANCE welcomes DISH Network as a new member of its Board of Directors.

“Carriers around the world are recognizing the importance of building next-generation, programmable networks that are open, intelligent and flexible, making the work of the O-RAN ALLIANCE more critical than ever,” said Sidd Chenumolu, DISH vice president of technology development. “At DISH, we are in a unique position as we build a 5G network entirely upon O-RAN standards, and the work of this organization creates a unified roadmap as our partners join us in developing a disaggregated and open RAN. We look forward to playing a continued role in the success of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and the development of standards that enhance connectivity worldwide.”

O-RAN ALLIANCE’s Minimum Viable Plan (MVP) Towards Commercial O-RAN Solutions

O-RAN’s specification effort, open software development, as well as testing and integration, will focus on priorities set by its operator members. This approach will allow the O-RAN ecosystem players to prioritize the delivery of a minimum viable set of end-to-end O-RAN solutions applicable in commercial networks. The first release of the MVP includes already published specifications and additional work items in the area of:

• Open fronthaul specifications provide fully specified control, user and synchronization interface, management plane interface between O-RU and O-DU, and relevant conformance and interoperability tests, enabling multi-vendor interoperability.
• Open transport defines the requirements of xhaul transport, proposes the best practices of deploying WDM and IP technologies in xhaul.
• Open hardware offers hardware reference designs for different modes of indoor picocell, outdoor microcell, outdoor Macrocell and open fronthaul gateway to accelerate the use of whitebox and facilitate RAN ecosystem diversity.
• Open stack provides a software reference design for O-CU/O-DU architecture, interfaces, internal modules, and APIs, to promote and guide the open source software development.
• Open cloud presents O-Cloud reference design with the fundamental synchronization requirements and real life deployment recommendations.
• Testing and integration sets the criteria and guidelines for the formation of Open Testing and Integration Centers (OTICs), ensuring consistency and quality of the testing of O-RAN products and solutions. Subsequent O-RAN releases will extend the MVP with additional features and functionalities based on continuing surveys and updates of operators’ deployment priorities.

28 New or Updated O-RAN Specifications Released since November 2020

On February 26, 2021, the O-RAN ALLIANCE published another 28 specification documents, including 10 new titles. For more details on the new specifications, please check this O-RAN blog post. To download ORAN specifications, please proceed to www.o-ran.org/specifications.