EchoStar Corporation announced on Monday the launch of the Open RAN Center for Integration and Deployment (ORCID), a state-of-the-art Open RAN (O-RAN) testing and evaluation lab housed at EchoStar's Cheyenne, Wyoming, data center. The facility, supported by a USD 50 million grant from the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (Innovation Fund), offers vendors the opportunity to test and validate O-RAN solutions using EchoStar's live commercial-grade cloud-native Open RAN network, the company said.
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NTIA Grant
"The Open RAN Center for Integration and Deployment (ORCID) is now open for business. We appreciate the trust and partnership of NTIA in this effort, which includes a historic USD 50 million grant from the Innovation Fund," said EchoStar.
"ORCID represents a significant milestone in both EchoStar's and the US's journey to drive and lead the adoption of open and interoperable radio access networks. We look forward to the groundbreaking advancements expected to emerge from this initiative," EchoStar added.
The launch of ORCID, which comes six months after NTIA announced the Innovation Fund grant at an EchoStar 5G site in Las Vegas, provides trusted participants in the US and around the world with an opportunity to contribute to the development, deployment, and adoption of open and interoperable standards-based radio access networks.
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ORCID’s Living Laboratory
ORCID's "living laboratory" features a real field test setup, which will help drive the O-RAN ecosystem from the lab to commercial deployment, the company said.
EchoStar manages the ORCID consortium, which includes Fujitsu, Mavenir, VMware by Broadcom, and various other technology partners. EchoStar, with the help of its consortium partners, validated O-RAN technology at scale across the country, building an O-RAN 5G network that provides connectivity to more than 240 million Americans nationwide.
