• Japan’s NTT Docomo is on a mission to evangelise, and make money from, the deployment of Open RAN technology around the world
• Singapore’s StarHub has been working with NTT Docomo on its Open RAN strategy all year
• The partners have just conducted a commercial network multivendor field trial
• Fujitsu, SOLiD, Dell, Wind River and Nvidia were among the vendors involved

StarHub and partner NTT Docomo have completed a multivendor Open RAN field trial in the Singapore mobile operator’s production network using technology from the likes of Fujitsu, SOLiD, Dell, Wind River, and Nvidia, the operators recently announced. 

Japan’s NTT Docomo is one of the leading evangelists for Open RAN and has set up a separate unit, dubbed Open RAN Ecosystem Experience (Orex), to promote its Open RAN know-how and technologies (and those of its partners) to other network operators around the world, and in February formed an Open RAN joint venture called Orex SAI with NEC. 

The Japanese giant announced earlier this year that Orex, which is now part of NTT Docomo Global, is working with a number of mobile network operators – including StarHub, Smart in the Philippines, and Middle East telco giant Ooredoo – to develop their Open RAN strategies and set up field trials.

Now StarHub, which is Singapore’s second-largest mobile operator, with about 2.2 million mobile customers and a market share of almost 23% (it competes with market leader Singtel and M1), has completed a field trial, which began in April, with the demonstration of an Open RAN-enabled connection on its 5G network. 

“With the successful demonstration of our Open RAN, in collaboration with NTT Docomo, we are thrilled to be the first to bring it to market, marking this significant milestone for StarHub and Singapore,” stated StarHub CTO Ayush Sharma. “This not only underscores our commitment to delivering first-of-its-kind innovations that afford enterprises greater value, flexibility and customisability to choose what is best to meet their needs but also lets us vastly rethink how we approach network infrastructure differently,” he added.    

StarHub, which says it will continue to collaborate with NTT Docomo to “redefine and expand Open RAN capabilities,” stressed the key role that RAN intelligent controller (RIC) platforms and applications will play in enabling enterprise customers to “optimise network performance according to their user demands.”  

The trial involved the connection of Docomo’s Orex Open RAN 5G standalone (SA) solution to StarHub’s commercial 5G core platform with IPsec tunnels. The Open RAN solution comprised Fujitsu RAN software for the CU and DU (centralised and distributed unit) elements, Wind River’s cloud platform, Dell Technologies servers, Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units), and radio units from Fujitsu and South Korean vendor SOLiD Technologies. 

The setup validated “a multivendor framework, which can only be realised by Open RAN,” according to NTT Docomo, which also demonstrated the capabilities of its RIC platform and performed load balancing and security tests.

Test and measurement vendor Keysight Technologies provided its UE Simulator technology for the 5G test conducted in late August. During the test, StarHub achieved downlink data speeds of 1.295 Gbit/s and uplink speeds of 73.5 Mbit/s with latency as low as 15 milliseconds. Voice services (using evolved packet system, or EPS, fallback for IMS support) and text messaging services were also successfully tested.  

“Through Keysight’s UeSIM UE Emulation RAN Solutions, which validates end-to-end radio access network performance by emulating real network traffic over radio, StarHub’s Open RAN successfully performed a thorough validation of Docomo Orex packages to ensure network reliability, performance, and implementation, validating the Open RAN’s readiness for market adoption,” stated StarHub.

NTT Docomo’s chief Open RAN strategist and CTO of Orex SAI, Sadayuki Abeta, added: “On top of giving MNOs [mobile network operators] the freedom of choice and lowering operational costs, Open RAN allows MNOs to keep up with the latest technology, freeing them from any particular provider’s roadmap. This opens the door to an infinite number of possibilities in how we build networks around the world, and NTT Docomo and Orex SAI are excited to partner with StarHub in this endeavour,” he added. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV