As a pioneer of the open RAN movement and founding member of the O-RAN Alliance, Deutsche Telekom advocates the open RAN approach to build more open, flexible and intelligent radio access networks. Open RAN is now a critical component of the company’s long-term network innovation strategy to introduce vendor diversity, speed up the rate of innovation and by focusing on software operations to achieve higher levels of automation.

To achieve its goals, the company focuses on three main areas of the Open RAN architecture: The open fronthaul interface for multi-vendor interoperability; virtualization and the development of an independent management framework to manage integration complexity. As a key step in its open RAN journey, the company has been proving out solution performance and efficiency at O-RAN Town, its multi-vendor Open RAN trial network.

The company has also initiated i14y Lab in Berlin with partners to foster a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem and accelerate solution development.