Bharti Airtel approved as board member of O-RAN Alliance

O-RAN, originally co-founded by AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange has approved Bharti Airtel and six more members as new board members at its first O-RAN Board meeting during MWC Shanghai 2018.

Together, delegates from these 12 operators successfully co-signed the Constitution Articles of the O-RAN Alliance which marks the official foundation of the operator-driven initiative.

Open to all operators globally, the O-RAN Alliance is a world-wide, carrier-led effort to drive embedded intelligence and new levels of openness in the radio access network of next generation wireless systems.

At the meeting, Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs was elected as chair of the Board and Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, was appointed as Operations Officer.

Furthermore, the Board approved the O-RAN architecture with an initial set of 7 working groups: Use Cases & Overall Architecture; Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) (non-Real Time) & A1 Interface; RIC (near-Real Time) & E2 Interface; Open Fronthaul (FH) Interface; Stack Reference Design and F1/V1/E1/X2; Cloudification and orchestration; and White Box Hardware.

Zhengmao Li, CTO, China Mobile, and the host of this event said, “Not only traditional leading players in the industry, but also lots of startups and SEM have shown great interest in us. With the successful founding meeting and Board meeting, I am very confident that from now on the O-RAN wheel will accelerate at its full speed, and ultimately make a vital contribution to the 5G deployment in the few years to come.”

Andre Fuetsch, chairman of the O-RAN Alliance and president, AT&T Labs said, “The O-RAN Alliance will drive intelligent, open software defined networks and virtualization elements that will help 5G networks achieve their full potential and unlock new experiences for consumers and businesses around the world.”

“To realize the full potential of 5G, it is essential that we evolve the full end-to-end system architecture to be more flexible, agile and efficient. We look forward now to intensifying the work with our industry partners in the O-RAN Alliance to push more openness, intelligence and programmability into the radio access network and accelerate the transformation of mobile networks,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Operations Officer of the O-RAN Alliance and SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom.