The company’s CEO, Börje Ekholm, said he expects the company to feel the effects of Open RAN from 2023.
Ericsson says the lab is virtually accessible to customers globally although co-located with the company’s Cloud RAN expertise at Ericsson’s R&D site in Ottawa.
The site has 100MHz of indoor mid-band spectrum and 60MHz of indoor/outdoor mid-band spectrum is available for testing and co-creation activities.
Customers and partners can create and test Cloud RAN capabilities based on their own spectral holdings and use case requirements across indoor and outdoor networks.
Continous development
The lab support Ericsson’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) approach to dewveloping Cloud RAN technology to help seamless integration of new features and accelerates the feedback loop and design of new features.
This means that software can go live quickly, often within minutes of being developed.
The Open Lab follows on the heels of Ericsson’s announcement of its Cloud RAN product portfolio development.
The lab enables further development of Ericsson Cloud RAN solutions on COTS hardware, bringing higher efficiency and flexibility to customer networks.
It also aims to help service proviicers to develop new deployment and 5G use case scenarios, as well as automation to reduce manual interventio, plus virtualization, management, and orchestration.
Cloud-native
Ericsson Open Lab collaboration is not limited to Ericsson cloud-native infrastructure technology and RAN software advancements on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and acceleration hardware.
It will also seek to foster greater cooperation in areas such as machine learning, network automation and optimization with communications service providers and industry partners.
These service providers include KDDI, Ooredoo, Orange, Softbank Corp, Turkcell and ecosystem partners such as Intel, NVIDIA, Red Hat and Wind River.
Arnaud Vamparys, Senior Vice President, Radio Networks at Orange, says: “In the Open RAN journey, interoperability, cloudification and automation are key topics for Orange.
“The collaboration with Ericsson, as part of the Open Lab initiative, is allowing us to explore new flexible and innovative technologies like Cloud RAN on COTS hardware for mobile network evolution.”