NEC AND FRESHWAVE COLLABORATE ON OPEN RAN PROJECT

The ONE competition is part of the government's £250 million 5G Telecoms Supply Chain Diversification Strategy for fostering R&D projects for telecoms, including the Future RAN Competition (FRANC), Future Open Networks Research Challenge, and entities such as the SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre (SONIC) Labs, the UK Telecoms Innovation Network, and the UK Telecoms Lab.

Project NAVIGATE aims to design, deploy, test, and validate a blueprint for deploying open and sharable, public mobile 4G and 5G capacity in High-Density Deployment (HDD) environments. The project intends to demonstrate deployment at scale using Open RAN. Project NAVIGATE is one of 19 projects in the ONE Competition that aim to demonstrate the reliability and feasibility of Open RAN technologies. The total project budget for NAVIGATE is £7.42 million. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) of the UK Government will contribute £3.32 million and the remainder will be invested by NEC & Freshwave.

Project NAVIGATE sees NEC and Freshwave collaborating to provide a dense urban area in London with a small-cell solution based on NEC's Open vRAN software. The project aims to showcase that the Open RAN solution is technically and operationally viable, demonstrating that it is more cost-effective and energy-efficient compared to legacy single RAN networks. NAVIGATE supports the multi-operator neutral host network to facilitate the deployment of Open RAN, enabling all UK mobile operators' networks to connect to it.

Project NAVIGATE will deliver on the UK Government's commitment to promote a diversified telecoms infrastructure in the UK that encourages greater industry innovation and collaboration. The project delivers improved openness in line with the UK Government's Open RAN Principles and acts as a catalyst to lowering the barriers to entry for new Open RAN vendors.

For more details about the ONE competition, click here.