Federal 5G Challenge Aimed at Developing Plug-and-Play Networks
The overall goal of the DOD/NTIA 5G Challenge is to drive the move to “true plug-and-play operation” with open radio access networks, said Julie Kub, program lead for the challenge, Thursday during an Informatech virtual conference. The challenge is focused on finding new entrants, promoting multivendor interoperability and reducing barriers to entry, she said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The 2022 challenge (see 2210070067) was the first and looked at “basic integration” with companies offering radio units (RU) and central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs), Kub said. In five weeks, a CU, DU and RU vendor “were able to complete end-to-end integration testing” using CableLabs as the laboratory, she said.
The companies were “very open towards working together and solving problems, even though they’re sometimes competitors,” Kub said. Integration was an issue, she said. Only one of the CUs was “completely able to be installed on our host lab’s hardware,” she said: Two weeks “was fine” for CU integration, but “we found that the RU really could have used four weeks and the and the DU could have used six weeks.” For 2023, the challenge will include mobility testing and combining the CU and DU since many vendors are offering combined units, she said.
“We’re still doing the wrap-around emulation, and we are doing end-to-end integration of multiple CU, DU and RUs for the mobility testing,” Kub said. The prizes are also larger this year, up to $7 million total compared to $3 million in 2022, she said. The timeline for the program this year is 24 weeks, she said.
Vodafone won’t move to a commercial ORAN deployment “with anything other than a network we can be very confident in,” said Andy Dunkin, its OpenRAN RF & digital platform development manager. ORAN “will evolve over time; we work hard to drive the best specifications,” he said.
The “magnitude” of Vodafone’s plans to deploy ORAN haven’t changed, Dunkin said. “We have very strong KPIs [key performance indicators] and expectations -- we haven’t shifted any of those,” he said. “We’re super-pleased with where we are; we’re very comfortable,” he said. ORAN will have to be able to achieve the same KPIs as legacy networks, he said: “This is about deploying the very best macro networks that we possibly can, and ensuring the very best services to our customers.”
Vodafone works with “a broad range of vendors” and is looking to “drive opportunities,” Dunkin said. “We’re working with startups and small teams to try to bring the best of technology into our open RAN platforms.” If industry wants a competitive ecosystem "we've got to be able to feed that ecosystem," he said.
Whether ORAN is meeting expectations depends on where it will be deployed and what the use cases are, said Sundara Venkatesh, market development executive at Japanese equipment maker Anritsu. As ORAN is built out in different areas, starting with private networks and smaller markets, more will be known, he said. “The proof of the pudding is always in the eating,” he said: “It’s a process.”