February 3rd, 2021 – NTT DOCOMO, Inc. has agreed with 12 companies – namely Dell Technologies Japan, Fujitsu, Intel K.K., Mavenir, NEC Corp, NTT DATA Corp, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Technologies, Red Hat, VMware K.K., Wind River and Xilinx, Inc. – to cooperate towards the ‘5G Open RAN Ecosystem’.

The objective is to globally accelerate open radio access networks (RAN), and help enable flexible network deployment to serve diverse company and operator needs in the 5G era.

The O-RAN ALLIANCE has developed specifications and promoted products that allow operators to more freely combine disaggregated base station equipment. On the other hand, in order to bring out performance with products from different vendors, there are issues that are only found at interoperability testing which operators actually introducing open RAN have to deal with.

NTT DOCOMO will start discussions with the 12 companies on accelerating open RAN introduction to operators. Specifically, NTT DOCOMO’s target is to package best-of-breed RAN and to introduce, operate and manage them based on demands from operators considering open RAN introduction. By leveraging its years of activities in driving open network and know-how (which realized the world’s first open RAN for 5G using O-RAN), NTT DOCOMO is committed to maximize companies’ strengths in furtherance of the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem, and providing high-quality and flexible networks.

5G Open RAN ecosystem
Additionally, NTT DOCOMO will develop vRAN (virtualised RAN) with higher flexibility and scalability to further drive open RAN targeting commercialisation in 2022. As COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) servers can be used and dedicated equipment are not required for vRAN, it is possible to realise flexible and cost efficient networks. As of today, NTT DOCOMO will start discussion towards verification of vRAN, including performance assessments. As for the vRAN verification environment that will be constructed, opportunities for remote usage will be made available for operators themselves to freely conduct tests.

NTT DOCOMO will continue to cooperate with various industry partners towards accelerating wide adoption of open network, especially O-RAN and vRAN, which can cater for diversifying needs with flexibility and agility.