Its 5G Radio Unit is star performer in Open RAN World
Fujitsu supplies the Best Performance Solution in Open RAN, according to the judges at the Open RAN World awards in Berlin. The award identified the tri-band, O-RAN compliant 5G radio unit (RU) is currently your best option for injecting power and pace into Open RAN performance, based on its unique characteristics and the deployment data available.
The Fujitsu tri-band RU is the first available 5G O-RAN compliant tri-band RU of its kind, thanks to its high efficiency in a small form factor. These enable mobile network operators (MNOs) to use less power and lower their leasing and operational costs. The new compact form factor offersmultiple frequency bands in one unit, the upshot of which is that MNOs have equipment that will fit within more sites, which gives them more options over finding commercial property they can use. This helps them find potentially cheaper industrial units and gives them the widest set of options for improving network performance.
“Increasingly crowded towers and high energy costs are driving demand for compact, efficient, multi-band radios with lower total cost of ownership,” said Dr Femi Adeyemi, pictured, head of global wireless offering at Fujitsu, “interoperability, 4Gbps throughput and reliability will drive faster delivery of 5G services.”
This Fujitsu Open RAN RU system has key advantages to operators seeking higher performance and faster delivery of 5G services with lower total cost of ownership. After it was used in the DISH network Stephen Bye, who was then chief commercial officer, said the price-performance-form factor set a new bar for the industry. “Its power consumption is definitely very competitive and can support future bands that DISC can deploy without needing to climb a tower,” Bye said,“It outperforms every other competitor that we’ve looked at in the market.”
Dual-band radios are nothing but O-RAN compliant tri-band radios represent a pioneering advancement. Adding a third band only makes the radio 15% bigger but the power saving of replacing a three single-band radios with a single tri-band radio instead overshadows that. The same is goes for tower costs. Since a single Open RAN tri-band RU has only a small fraction of the wind loading and weight of three single-band RUs, tower leasing costs drop dramatically. The small form factor also gives operators more choices and they can use towers that might be too crowded for multiple single-band radios.
Fujitsu O-RAN compliant radios have been successfully integrated with more than five different vendors’ Distributed Units (DUs) in multiple operator networks around the world, fostering a more competitive and open ecosystem. With increasingly crowded towers and high energy costs, demand is growing for compact, efficient multi-band radios that work with other O-RAN compliant DU vendors and still perform reliably.
As the industry increasingly relies on mid-band spectrum with limited range, securing site locations close to users is becoming ever more important. By having an increased number of towers to select from, RF engineers have greater flexibility to deploy Open RAN RUs in more ideal locations to provide improved overall network capacity and/or throughput.