O-RAN ALLIANCE Announces New Leadership, New Specifications, 3 Face-to-Face Meetings in 2023 and Further Alignment with TIP

(BUSINESS WIRE)--O-RAN ALLIANCE welcomes 4iG as its 32^nd operator Member. O-RAN diverse membership currently counts more than 330 companies and institutions from all over the world jointly developing the open RAN ecosystem.

O-RAN ALLIANCE leadership elected for the 2022-2024 term

On October 24, 2022 the O-RAN ALLIANCE’s General Meeting concluded the election of the alliance’s Board of Directors for the upcoming term 2022-2024. The election took place according to the O-RAN ALLIANCE Constitution, which sets clear rules for the alliance’s operation according to WTO criteria. The Board continues to operate in its full setup of 15 leading Mobile Network Operators, unchanged from the previous term. For full list of O-RAN Board members, please check our website.

Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom, has been elected as new chairman of the Board. Dr. Choi had previously served as COO of O-RAN ALLIANCE since its founding in 2018. In the chairmanship he replaces Andre Fuetsch, who served as chairman from 2018 until his retirement from AT&T in August 2022.

“The recently elected O-RAN ALLIANCE leadership stays fully committed to O-RAN’s mission to transform Radio Access Networks towards open, intelligent, virtualized and fully interoperable RAN,” said Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, Chairman of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and SVP Group Technology, Deutsche Telekom. “Building on its foundation of specifications, open software development and testing and integration efforts, O-RAN will continue seeking ways to facilitate the open RAN ecosystem towards rapid progress of commercial deployments.”

Stefan Engel-Flechsig was appointed by the Board as O-RAN ALLIANCE’s COO. Stefan has a long professional career in the mobile industry and has supported O-RAN as legal counsel since the launch of the association.

“Since its launch O-RAN ALLIANCE is an open and transparent technical organization where incumbent as well as emerging industry players or academic institutions can join and contribute to any of its efforts,” said Stefan Engel-Flechsig, COO of the O-RAN ALLIANCE. “Based on the consensus principle, O-RAN ALLIANCE is well positioned in the global mobile industry to deliver on its mission.”

Face-to-face meetings boost the progress of O-RAN technical groups

In October 2022, after 3 years O-RAN ALLIANCE successfully resumed face-to-face meetings of its Work Groups and Focus Groups, with more than 500 participants from 148 companies around the world. In-person meetings greatly boost the progress of O-RAN efforts.

During the meeting week, the first workshop of the O-RAN Next Generation Research Group also took place. For the workshop summary please refer to our web announcement.

In 2023 O-RAN plans to hold 3 face-to-face meetings of its membership in different regions. The meeting will be prepared with full respect of current health and travel regulations and will allow remote participation of delegates unable to travel.

53 O-RAN technical documents published since July 2022

O-RAN ALLIANCE Work Groups and Focus Groups recently published 53 new technical documents completing its Release 002. It includes two new specification titles:

• A1 interface: Use Cases and Requirements – the first dedicated A1 interface use case specification with stage-2 level flow chart
• The specification on a new E2 Service Model (E2SM), Cell Configuration and Control – covering Cell and slice-level resource configuration and control for network slicing use case

For more details about newly released O-RAN specifications please read our web announcement. All O-RAN specifications are available for download at our website.

Further alignment of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP)

On October 25, 2022 during the Open RAN Summit at Fyuz in Madrid, O-RAN and TIP announced a further alignment of their value propositions and deliverables to complement each other seamlessly.

O-RAN and TIP align on a regular basis to ensure O-RAN MVP feature packages and release roadmaps are synchronized with TIP Blueprints. TIP references O-RAN technical and test specifications and TIP members help to improve them through the change request process. O-RAN and TIP mutually recognize test results performed in the O-RAN-approved Open Testing and Integration Centers (OTIC) and TIP Community labs.

Alignment between O-RAN and TIP enables the ecosystem to streamline the development of O-RAN based products, verify interfaces and interoperability of components, and demonstrate the functionality and operational performance of the open RAN solutions that are commercially available.

About O-RAN ALLIANCE

The O-RAN ALLIANCE is a world-wide community of more than 330 mobile operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry. As the RAN is an essential part of any mobile network, the O-RAN ALLIANCE’s mission is to re-shape the industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. The new O-RAN specifications 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. To achieve this, the O-RAN ALLIANCE publishes new RAN specifications, releases open software for the RAN, and supports its members in integration and testing of their implementations.

For more information, please visit www.o-ran.org.

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