Ericsson and Dell establish an open radio alliance

 Ericsson and Dell establish an open radio alliance

To better serve mobile operators, Ericsson and Dell Technologies partnered to develop open RAN-based network cloud transformation strategies.

According to the companies, part of the partnership involves pre-packaging an offering to expedite deployments and eliminate risk from operations by installing Ericsson Cloud RAN software on Dell PowerEdge servers. The agreement expands upon a 2023 agreement to create cloud RAN infrastructure.

Ericsson and Dell establish an open radio alliance

In addition to offering marketing and implementation support, Dell and Ericsson said they hope to collaborate with operators to "develop simple and reliable open RAN-based network cloud transformation strategies."

To streamline the deployment process, "from factory validation to installation and ongoing operational management," they intend to develop services.

As the manufacturer is ready to introduce commercial open RAN-based products, Fredrik Jejdling, EVP and head of business area Networks at Ericsson, pointed out that cloud-native networks will allow frequent updates and the release of new features by operators.

As part of a $14 billion open RAN agreement Ericsson signed with the US operator in December 2023, Dell was listed as one of the vendors working with AT&T.

To "accelerate cloud-based open networks," Chris Sambar, head of AT&T's network, said vendors must collaborate to create services that offer "more growth opportunities with minimal risk."

The most recent collaboration may indicate a more significant role for Dell in AT&T's open RAN strategy or provide a platform that other operators can readily use.

Because these partnerships complement the idea of disaggregated architectures and involve various suppliers contributing at different stages of the open RAN stack, they "should really be useful to the open movement," according to Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink, who made this statement to Mobile World Live.

It is not unexpected or surprising. Since the early days of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), which was about disaggregation as much as virtualization, we have seen these multi-vendor partnerships and blueprints," he said.