Sprint Opens Telecom Infra Project Community Lab for OpenRAN 5G NR

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. , Nov. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at TIP Summit 2019, Sprint (NYSE: S) announced the opening of a Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Community Lab aimed at furthering the development and deployment of OpenRAN 5G NR solutions. Located at Sprint’s Kansas-city area headquarters in Overland Park, Kan. , the lab is one of 12 TIP Community Labs around the world. It will host the trial and test activities of the TIP OpenRAN 5G NR Project Group co-chaired by Sprint.

"Our goal is to push the pace of innovation for 2.5 GHz 5G NR based on open reference designs to ultimately deliver better connectivity and services to customers," said Dr. John Saw, Sprint CTO. "We’re excited to open this lab resource and we look forward to collaborating even further with the TIP community."

TIP is a collaborative telecom community. Launched in February 2016, TIP was started with the goal of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry.

Sprint is co-chair of the TIP OpenRAN 5G NR Project Group focused on developing sub-6 GHz 5G NR small cells and macro cells for outdoor and indoor use cases, with millimeter wave 5G NR solutions to follow. The OpenRAN 5G NR Project Group aims to create an open reference design that leverages general purpose hardware, allowing operators to select best-of-breed hardware components coupled with disaggregated software for a flexible, modular 5G NR platform. Based on operator input, the Project Group is developing modeling techniques and a test framework for specific applications and deployment scenarios using both standalone and non-standalone 5G NR architectures. In August, Sprint contributed a draft technical specification to the Project Group for a 2.5 GHz, n41 band white box 5G NR base station.