Recapping a day of lab testing insights in the context of Open RAN
To set the scene we had invited representatives from our consortium, Fotis Karonis (Capgemini) and Slawomir Stanczak (Fraunhofer HHI) welcome the audience. They were succeeded by Alex Jinsung Choi (Deutsche Telekom and executive sponsor of BOWW) as well as Shamik Mishra (Capgemini) in an open dialogue on latest Open RAN developments.
Stéphane Téral followed suit by pitching a more provocative stance on the large number of Open RAN test labs popping up globally. Be it in a government, operator or vendor fashion, he challenged the real need of all those individual labs potentially duplicating testing efforts. Concluding in one sentence he said that one stop testing based on open collaboration between all players is the way to go forward.
Global alignment between testing labs about their scope and methodologies
Along those lines, our panelists did develop on the idea of who should do which scope of testing or validation. Participants such as Julie Kub (NTIA), Simon Burley (Ofcom) and Maggie Chao (ITRI) shared their international perspective. Katja Henke (i14y Lab) joined them on-stage to complete the international lab big picture. The importance of neutral labs was equally highlighted as further need stressed in terms of closer alignment potential.
Feedback from prospective users will help build out technical maturity of i14y Lab in future
To inform the understanding of needed collaboration, we had four operators including Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone as well as NTT Docomo perceived an Open RAN leader together on stage. The operators in the consortium shared one common view that up to 80% of testing can be done together, which NTT agreed to since they had opened their labs for others in the past.
In a nutshell
Formats such as BOWW and the i14y Lab Summit are essential for building and strengthening the Open RAN community and wider ecosystem. They show us that we need to work together and share resources as well as insights to make Open RAN work for every one of us acting in the telco space.
As there were more topics captured on and off stage, we from i14y Lab highly recommend to watch the YouTube live-stream that has become on demand in the meantime. Subscribe to the monthly i14y Lab newsletter to not miss out on further network disaggregation updates from us.
