Ericsson, AT&T claim open RAN milestone

In a feat announced as Ericsson held a live session to kick-off its MWC24 activities, the companies revealed a cloud RAN call had been conducted, in what was described as a milestone towards deploying open RAN.

AT&T said it now has commercial traffic flowing on cloud RAN sites, the first of which are located south of Dallas, Texas.

As part of the deployment, AT&T and Ericsson explained they had migrated one frequency band using 3700MHz for C-band traffic to cloud RAN infrastructure. This is part of the US operator’s goal towards a fully open agile network while creating an open environment for developers to create new apps and services.

Ericsson CEO, Borje Ekholm, emphasised the importance of open APIs and opening up telecoms networks to drive innovation. “I like to think that with network APIs, we put the power of the network at the fingertips of the developers,” he said.

The Ericsson boss was also joined in the session by Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, who spoke of the opportunity of AI in the telco sector.

Dell explained AI has the potential to really enhance networks using machine learning, as well as fine tuning hardware and software performance to reduce energy consumption and improve reliability.

For the network operations, Dell believes there is an opportunity through AI to maximise zero touch operations to support infrastructure and lifecycle management.

Finally, Dell said the telecoms industry has an incredible opportunity in AI due to the vast amount of data it has access to. “If you have no data, you have no AI,” he said.