European Carriers Pin Sustainability, Security on Open RAN
Europe’s largest wireless carriers are inching along on their collective push to deploy open radio access networks across the continent, issuing the second phase of technical requirements for the open and disaggregated architecture. Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TIM, Telefónica, and Vodafone said they’re particularly interested in energy efficiency requirements that could support their sustainability efforts through open RAN. “It is expected that open RAN networks will gradually become more energy efficient than traditional RAN, benefiting from open RAN concepts such as cloudification, disaggregation, and native artificial intelligence,” the quintet wrote in a joint statement. The operators originally signed an agreement to individually and jointly commit to deploy open RAN technology, which separates hardware from software with open interfaces.