Five Middle East mobile operators have announced they are working together to push forward their work towards open RAN technology in their networks. The five are Zain, Etisalat, Saudi Arabia’s STC, Mobily, and Du, the brand of Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company. The move reflects closely the initiative earlier this year by five European telcos, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone, which has similar aims. The five Middle East operators say they are all committed to open RAN solutions, with the aim of driving drive innovation, cost efficiencies and customer mobile experience. They will share their industry knowledge and experience, setting a clear path to drive innovation for the ICT sector across the Middle East. A memorandum of understanding between the five confirms commitment to deploy open RAN across their footprint, providing an opportunity to traditional RAN vendors to adopt open interfaces, software and hardware to build more agile and flexible mobile networks in the 5G and 4G era, support new entrants with innovative solutions and achieve cost efficiencies in RAN deployments.
In a joint statement that the partnership will open immense opportunities for operators and the telecom ecosystem with the availability of interoperable, competitive and commercial grade open RAN products, building a framework to exchange best practices and technical outcomes. With open RAN, the industry is working towards standards and technical specifications that define open interfaces within the radio system, including hardware and software, so that networks can be deployed and operated based on mix-and-match components from different suppliers. The introduction of open RAN, virtualisation and automation will enable a fundamental change in the way operators manage networks and deliver services. Operators will be able to add or shift capacity more quickly for end users, automatically resolve network incidents or provide enterprise level services on-demand for industry.