• Ericsson is one of the founding members of the AI-RAN Alliance
• The Swedish telco is already part of an AI-RAN R&D initiative at T-Mobile US, one of the alliance’s other founders
• Now Ericsson has struck a collaborative agreement with the alliance’s other founding telco member, Japan’s SoftBank
• But it’s not alone – Nvidia and Nokia are already set up in SoftBank’s AI-RAN camp

Ericsson is fast positioning itself as one of the key players in the emerging AI-RAN sector having brokered direct R&D relationships with the two leading telcos in the space, T-Mobile US and Japan’s SoftBank. 

Ericsson, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Arm, Microsoft, Nokia, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics, SoftBank and T-Mobile US, was announced as a founding member of the AI-RAN Alliance when the new industry body was launched in February this year. It’s aim was to figure out how to use AI tools to better run radio access networks (AI in the RAN), how to integrate AI and RAN workloads on the same underlying IT infrastructure (AI and RAN), and how to develop and deploy AI applications at the edge of the cellular network that can be delivered over high-speed mobile data connections (AI on RAN).  

And just recently the Swedish vendor was unveiled, along with Nokia, Nvidia and T-Mobile US, as one of the partners that will invest in an AI-RAN Innovation Centre located at T-Mobile’s headquarters campus in Bellevue, Washington, in a bid to bring RAN and AI innovation “closer together”, “revolutionise” RAN capabilities and “serve customers in unprecedented ways”, the partners announced – see T-Mobile US, Nvidia take the AI-RAN initiative.

Now Ericsson has announced a collaboration with SoftBank to “explore the potential for developing new AI-integrated RAN solutions that boost network efficiency and performance” by identifying “common network and compute infrastructure solutions that allow both AI and RAN to operate on the same network infrastructure. The goal is to unlock new use cases for communications service providers by using the power of AI to enhance network efficiency,” the two companies jointly announced. 

The duo will “jointly conduct techno-economic analyses, develop prototypes and run lab demos to optimise RAN and AI convergence at the edge. The initiative will also focus on hardware partitioning, workload distribution, and software portability across different hardware platforms,” they noted.  

Softbank’s CTO, Hideyuki Tsukuda, stated: “SoftBank welcomes this new collaboration with Ericsson, which aligns with our strategy to invest in AI infrastructure that enables the overlay and optimisation of RAN. This partnership reflects our vision of leveraging AI to enhance communication networks and opens up opportunities for collaboration with key industry players.”

But Ericsson isn’t alone in cosying up to SoftBank on AI-RAN developments: In September, the Japanese telco and Nokia signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for joint research and development on the integration of AI and RAN technology and noted that they “plan to collaborate on the development of AI-RAN using Nokia’s virtualised radio access network (cloud RAN) platform and conduct field testing using centimetre waves, which are expected to be utilised for 6G.”

And SoftBank has been exploring the potential of AI-RAN architectures for more than a year already with Nvidia. In May 2023, the Japanese operator announced it was working with Nvidia on a way to host generative AI (GenAI) and virtual radio access network (vRAN) applications “on a multi-tenant common server platform” that is more cost and energy efficient than current deployment models – see Nvidia and SoftBank team on GenAI, 5G/6G platform.

So Ericsson, Nvidia, Nokia and SoftBank are emerging as the early frontrunners in the race to develop an AI-RAN architecture that makes sense to network operators, but they will need the broader support of the telco community to achieve the scale needed to make their efforts truly worthwhile.

That’s one of the topics that TelecomTV is set to discuss next week with Alex Choi, the former chair of the O-RAN Alliance and senior VP of group technology at Deutsche Telekom, who joined SoftBank in August as principal fellow of the operator’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology and was appointed as chair of the AI-RAN Alliance. Our exclusive interview with Choi will air as part of The AI-Native Telco Summit programming (15-16 October): Register for the summit now for free. 

For more on the topic of AI and RAN, check out TelecomTV’s latest free-to-download DSP Leaders report, AI’s Impact on the Radio Access Network, and see AI’s main impact on the RAN is still to come – report.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV