Country’s second-largest telecom operator, Bharti Airtel hosted India’s first O-RAN Alliance Plugfest recently. The event was aimed to demonstrate and explain the growing maturity and development of O-RAN (Open-Radio Access Network) ecosystem in serving the customers and clients with better and new technologies such as the 5G network. For the unaware, O-RAN Alliance was announced back in 2018, and major telecom companies across the world such as AT&T, Orange, China Mobile and more have been a part of it. Bharti Airtel has also been a part of the group since its inception. More details on the story ahead.
Airtel Hosts First O-RAN Alliance Plugfest in India
O-RAN Alliance is committed to working on developing radio access networks (RAN) for making them smarter and better than the previous generation networks. Bharti Airtel has recently hosted the first-ever O-RAN Alliance Plugfest in India.
Thing worth noting here is that Airtel was the first telecom company in India which commercially deployed a virtual RAN as per the open architecture suggested by the O-RAN Alliance. The telco is committed to developing and providing better RAN solutions to its innovative and disruptive partners all around the world to enable them to create solutions capable of solving problems in scale.
The recently held O-RAN Alliance event was the second time this sort of event took place. In this Indian edition of the event, Airtel partnered up with the leading companies such as VIAVI Solutions, VVDN, Xilinx, NEC, Mavenir, Altran, ASOCS, and Altiostar for demonstrating multiple technology use cases of the O-RAN networks, including 5G.
Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel said, "We are committed to evolving our network through an open architecture and are delighted to partner with the O-RAN community. This offers a great opportunity to Indian organizations with innovative hardware, software and services capabilities to build a “’Make in India - O-RAN solution.”
Andre Fuetsch, Chairman of the O-RAN Alliance, said that integration and testing of the open RAN ecosystem is necessary before rolling it out commercially. That is why the Alliance helps its members by providing them with an efficient global plugfest framework which complements the O-RAN software community.
