The newly signed co-operation agreement brings together two widely recognised industry organisations in the field of open and standardised 5G networks. NGMN and the O-RAN ALLIANCE aim to enable and to support the timely and successful delivery of 5G-based communication solutions for acceleration and adoption of open and intelligent RAN networks to the market with a global open ecosystem. Starting today, both parties intend to achieve this by initially working together in activities related to transport for disaggregated RAN architectures, eventually expanding the collaboration to other areas.

“NGMN and the O-RAN ALLIANCE share the mission to support the standardisation of 5G interoperable networks”, said Anita Doehler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance. “We are looking forward to a close co-operation with the O-RAN ALLIANCE and to exchange our views on the RAN decomposition for 5G networks, in particular the various RAN functional splits and the transport requirements to support the various deployment options. As a wide number of industry activities are related to this subject, we also look to encourage industry alignment.”

“Since its formation in 2018, the O-RAN ALLIANCE has successfully delivered new standards for an open and intelligent RAN,” said Alex Choi, COO of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and SVP Technology Strategy & Innovation, Deutsche Telekom. “As the transport is the glue that connects radio sites, edge data centres and centralised clouds in a disaggregated RAN architecture, significant effort is required to design and define a robust and scalable transport to meet stringent requirements of future networks. We look forward to working with NGMN to achieve this and we encourage industry alignment.”

ABOUT O-RAN ALLIANCE
The O-RAN ALLIANCE is a world-wide community of mobile operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry. As the RAN is an essential part of any mobile network, the O-RAN ALLIANCE’s mission is to re-shape the industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. The new O-RAN standards will enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem with faster innovation to improve user experience. O-RAN based mobile networks will at the same time improve the efficiency of RAN deployments as well as operations by the mobile operators. To achieve this, the O-RAN ALLIANCE publishes new RAN specifications, releases open software for the RAN, and supports its members in integration and testing of their implementations. For more information, please visit www.o-ran.org