The Open RAN Policy Coalition is excited to be back at MWC Barcelona this week! We look forward to connecting with industry leaders, policymakers and our Coalition members, who have many exciting events, announcements and demonstrations planned. Below are a few highlights:
- Analog Devices on Wednesday will host a panel discussion on “The Business of 5G: Driving 5G Monetization Opportunities,” exploring how operators will have new opportunities to capture significant value in the coming 12-24 months. Initial 5G rollouts prioritized enhancing mobile broadband experience through improved speed and capacity. Subsequent releases of 5G have introduced advanced capabilities, presenting fresh avenues to enrich features, drive revenue, and streamline costs. This session will explore burgeoning opportunities from these latest 3GPP developments, delving into the extraordinary potential that lies ahead for 5G monetization.
- Also on Wednesday, join Joe Barry of Analog Devices and Dr. Andreas Mueller, 5G and 6G Leader at Bosch, for a concise yet comprehensive overview of the past, present and future of Industrial 5G and the primary challenges that need addressing to enhance its adoption and effectiveness. During the keynote session on “The Dawn of Industrial 5G – From Theory to Practice” Dr. Muller will also cover the future transition from 5G to 6G, emphasizing the importance of integrating lessons learned from 5G into the early stages of 6G development.
- Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. introduced Virtuora IA, a collection of network applications powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that use network-focused machine learning (ML) models and inherent telecommunications expertise to significantly improve network performance with drastically simplified operations. Fujitsu’s AI-powered network applications employ neural network modeling to provide practical network optimization benefits that offer real competitive advantage in today’s 5G market and beyond. With this new collection of Virtuora Intelligent Applications, Fujitsu is delivering AI-powered applications focused on power savings and network optimization, as well as automated incremental deployment and rollback. To learn more, visit Fujitsu in Hall 2 Stand 2G60 at MWC.
- Marvell Technology, Inc. announced it will showcase its latest product and partner portfolio for carrier infrastructure at MWC Barcelona. To address massive mobile data growth, carriers are accelerating 5G deployment and evolving their Radio Access Networks (RANs) to open and virtualized architectures. To speed this transition, Marvell partners are applying its accelerated compute technology to yield greater network flexibility and efficiency. As traffic growth drives the need for higher bandwidth transmission, Marvell optical and copper connectivity technology is powering advances from fronthaul to metro. Visit Marvell in stand 2F34 in Hall 2.
- Mavenir and QCT announced a collaboration with Intel to introduce the QuantaEdge EGX77B-1U short form factor design to provide a high performance, cost optimized edge platform that lowers the entry threshold to deploy Open RAN. The platform allows deployment in virtually any cabinet type and provides flex-configuration via PCIe expansion to enable additional acceleration or band support based on site utilization.
- Mavenir and Red Hat are providing a complete, end-to-end cloud-native open RAN system for Vodafone Idea’s pilot deployment utilizing millimeter wave spectrum. The pilot deployment is in the advanced commercial phase and marks the first O-RAN-compliant deployment into Vodafone Idea’s network, utilizing the N78 and N258 millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum bands and B1 supporting NSA architecture.
- NTT DOCOMO and NEC Corporation announced that they plan to establish a joint venture company, OREX SAI, INC. to provide OREX Packages solutions for the full-scale global deployment of Open RAN services. OREX SAI will locally source products and services in each market and perform system verifications to deliver mobile networks tailored to the needs of each overseas telecommunications operator. Leveraging NEC’s established business infrastructure and global network in over 50 countries and territories, the joint venture will accelerate its global expansion of Open RAN business.
- Samsung Electronics and Vodafone, in collaboration with AMD, announced that they have successfully demonstrated an end-to-end call with the latest AMD processors enabling Open RAN technology, a first for the industry. This joint achievement represents the companies’ technical leadership in enriching the Open RAN ecosystem throughout the industry. The companies will demonstrate its test result exceeding 1Gbps throughput for multi UE on multi-cell configuration at MWC 2024.
- Wind River announced that it will be showcasing with Encora, a digital engineering services company, an advanced AI automation of 5G Open RAN operations at Mobile World Congress. The Wind River and Encora demonstration shows an AI LLM interacting with live deployed cloud infrastructure representative of a core-to-edge service provider network. Specifically, the demonstration shows, with normal human language interaction, a conversational ability to query the live underlying systems via API integration with the AI, enabling the user to converse with the AI to discover, analyze, and repair complex problems in a highly distributed system, such as a 5G Open RAN deployment.