Reliance Jio, Verizon joins O-RAN Alliance board

The O-RAN Alliance announced that Reliance Jio, TIM, and Verizon joined the O-RAN board.

The O-RAN Alliance is a world-wide, carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next-generation wireless systems.

"This is a great opportunity for the Service Provider Industry as network, services, and applications leverage cloud-native platforms and the right time to fundamentally transform the RAN infrastructure and platforms. We look forward to working closely with the O-RAN Alliance in the acceleration and adoption of open, intelligent, and programmable RAN architectures that can clearly disrupt the building blocks of 5G and beyond," said Mathew Oommen, President, Reliance Jio.

"We look forward to working with all the Alliance Partners in shaping the foundation of future networks around the globe," Oommen said.

O-RAN is organized as a series of work groups focused on specific aspects of the RAN open architecture and interfaces, with a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) coordinating the overall work program.

"TIM is a strong supporter of collaborative communities and standards, and we think that open RAN will be a very important part in the big 5G transformation that is coming. We will also contribute to O-RAN's work with our mmWave Testing Lab in Torino, one of the first in Europe," Elisabetta Romano, TIM CTO

Ed Chan, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Architect of Verizon said that we will leverage the foundational success of xRAN to accelerate the work in O-RAN.

"Verizon looks forward to contributing to the success of O-RAN in realizing network components' interoperability at a global scale to create the next generation of flexible wireless networks for our customers," he added.

Furthermore, O-RAN has also started collaboration arrangements with The Linux Foundation to establish an open source software community for the creation of open source RAN software.

Collaboration with The Linux Foundation will enable the creation of open source software supporting the O-RAN architecture and interfaces.

"We are excited to see alignment on this exciting area of technology," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, The Linux Foundation. "Our joint efforts will help accelerate the creation, integration, and deployment of open source in the RAN."