Ericsson has established the Ericsson Open Lab to enable collaboration and innovation with Ericsson Cloud RAN customers and ecosystem partners to drive virtualized 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN) technologies.
Ericsson Open Lab is accessible virtually to customers globally. It is co-located with the company’s Cloud RAN expertise at Ericsson’s R&D site in Ottawa. The company will support these activities from its locations around the world.

Ericsson Open Lab also aims to help service providers pursue and realize new deployment and 5G use case scenarios, as well as create opportunities to increase automation and reduce manual intervention. The lab offers space to further explore Open RAN technologies, including aspects such as virtualization, management, and orchestration.

Ericsson Open Lab collaboration is not limited to Ericsson cloud-native infrastructure technology and RAN software advancements on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and acceleration hardware.

It will also seek to cooperate in areas such as machine learning, network automation and optimization with communications service providers and industry partners. These service providers include KDDI, Ooredoo, Orange, Softbank Corp, Turkcell and ecosystem partners such as Intel, NVIDIA, Red Hat and Wind River.

“Open technology underpins the modern mobile miracle, which connects more than eight billion devices today with one set of global operating standards. With Ericsson Open Lab, we invite our customers and partners to co-create and bring new cloud innovations to 5G,” Fredrik Jejdling, head of Business Area Networks, Ericsson, said.

Toshikazu Yokai, executive officer, chief director of Mobile Technology, KDDI, says: “Working with Ericsson in the Open Lab will enable our design and engineering teams to collaborate in real-time and co-develop new virtualized RAN technologies to accelerate the intelligence and agility of our 5G networks.”

Arnaud Vamparys, senior vice president, Radio Networks at ‎Orange, says: “The collaboration with Ericsson, as part of the Open Lab initiative, is allowing us to explore new flexible and innovative technologies like Cloud RAN on COTS hardware for mobile network evolution.”

Ryuji Wakikawa, Vice President, Head of Advanced Technology Division, SoftBank Corp., says: “SoftBank is actively working with global ecosystem partners to realize virtualized RAN technologies. We look forward to our continued collaboration with Ericsson and its Open Lab to accelerate the innovation of building the most advanced mobile infrastructure.”

At the Ottawa site, 100MHz of indoor mid-band spectrum and 60MHz of indoor/outdoor mid-band spectrum is available for testing and co-creation activities. This enables customers and partners to create and test Cloud RAN capabilities based on their own spectral holdings and use case requirements across indoor and outdoor networks.

Fast and interactive collaboration with service providers and ecosystem partners also supports Ericsson’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) approach to Cloud RAN technology development.

The Open Lab follows on the heels of Ericsson’s announcement of its Cloud RAN product portfolio development. The lab enables further development of Ericsson Cloud RAN solutions on COTS hardware, bringing higher efficiency and flexibility to customer networks.