Plano, Texas, USA. 15 December 2021 – DZS, a global provider of broadband connectivity platforms and communications software solutions, announced its participation in the third Global O-RAN ALLIANCE PlugFest, and the to be conducted in South Korea, in partnership with 5G mobile network provider LG Uplus at its 5G Innovation Lab in Seoul.
This testing validated multi-vendor 5G interoperability and end-to-end alignment to O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications for open Radio Access Network (RAN) elements, including fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul interfaces between Radio Access Network equipment provided by DZS, Altiostar (a Rakuten Symphony company), NEC Corporation, Intel and Keysight Technologies.
“Having worked closely with LG Uplus for over 15 years to support its mobile transport infrastructure, DZS is proud to collaborate with LG Uplus in defining the future of 5G O-RAN architectures in South Korea and beyond,” says Charlie Vogt, president and CEO, DZS. “This highly successful PlugFest showcasing DZS open fronthaul and mobile transport solutions demonstrates how we, in combination with our industry partners, can enable a path forward for service providers seeking to modernise their networks with the flexibility and efficiencies of O-RAN architectures.
After this successful PlugFest in Seoul, it is clear that O-RAN is not only a compelling solution for greenfield networks like Rakuten Mobile who have scaled this architecture already to millions of subscribers in Japan, but also relevant to established service providers like LG Uplus who have already pioneered national-scale 5G deployments to continue to enhance their networks and address new markets.”
Starting in Q3 2021, the third O-RAN ALLIANCE Global Plugfest was held in 7 venues across the world including 94 participating companies demonstrating the commercial readiness of many O-RAN implementations. Vendor solutions in the LG Uplus multivendor interoperability test network included:
- DZS C1216RO open fronthaul gateways featuring built-in GPS and network timing support, and the high performance xHaul enabled DZS M3500 Cell Site Router (CSR)
- NEC 5G radio units (RUs)
- Altiostar/Rakuten Symphony virtualised distributed unit (O-DU) and central unit (O-CU) software
- Intel compute and network acceleration technology
- Keysight Technologies test solutions, including a mix of real Test UE (NEMO PBM) devices and multi-UE emulators (UeSIM) as well as the CoreSIM Core emulator
“LG Uplus thanks DZS for its expertise and leadership in pulling together this highly successful O-RAN Plugfest validating the open fronthaul use case,” says Dr. Sangheon Lee, head of the advanced network technology research unit for LG Uplus.
“O-RAN and virtualisation is clearly the future for 5G. As we look to cost effectively deliver advanced and differentiated services in the world’s most evolved 5G market in Korea, LG Uplus would contribute to activate the O-RAN ecosystem by announcing its empirical results on behalf of the Korean telecommunication industry. LG Uplus will leverage learnings from this PoC and we are under planning of trials in 2022 focused on in-building O-RAN 5G deployments and other real-world use cases for this exciting technology.”
With a forward-looking business strategy centered on empowering service providers and network operators through open standards, software-driven systems and freedom of choice, DZS solutions are at the core of groundbreaking, wide-scale open ecosystems like Rakuten Mobile’s fully virtualised, cloud-native O-RAN 5G mobile network. DZS’ commitment to the O-RAN architectural model is but one example of how DZS is enabling service providers worldwide to enjoy the cost, manageability and service benefits of flexible, scalable and interoperable wireless and wireline broadband networks with no vendor lock-in.
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