HFCL Limited announced today that the company has joined the O-RAN Alliance, a world-wide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research and academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry. O-RAN Alliance’s mission is to re-shape the RAN industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. The O-RAN standards enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem with faster innovation to improve user experience. O-RAN based mobile networks at the same time improve the efficiency of RAN deployments as well as operations by the mobile operators.
HFCL is investing in building a complete portfolio of products for 5G Radio Access Network and 5G Transport equipment that include 8T8R/32T32R Macro RU, Indoor/Outdoor Small Cell, Cell Site Router and Aggregation Routers for fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul, it said in a press statement.
As an O-RAN ALLIANCE member, HFCL will focus on contributing to standards that ensure a true open and multi-vendor RAN network with emphasis on fronthaul, beamforming, Near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), Service Management & Orchestration (SMO), and end-to-end test specifications. HFCL will also focus on integration and validation of its 5G Macro RU products and solutions at plugfests with other O-RAN ALLIANCE members and contributors.
Mahendra Nahata, Managing Director at HFCL said,“Open networking based on a well-defined architecture and pre-validated solution will enable operators to have increased supplier diversity, accelerate innovation, reduce CAPEX/OPEX, and quick roll-out of 5G networks.”
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HFCL’s 5G Marco Radio Unit (RU) products are based on O-RAN 7.2 split option that provides an open fronthaul interface towards any O-RAN based third party Distributed Unit (DU). The Company is investing in a state-of-the-art 5G Lab at its R&D center in Bangalore for demonstration of various O-RAN use cases and deployment scenarios. The test beds leverage O-RAN architecture and AI/ML to enable network intelligence and closed loop automation through open and standardized interfaces in a multi-vendor network, it added.
