CommAgility Awarded UK Government Funding for 5G Open RAN Project

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Wireless Telecom Group, Inc. announced that its CommAgility brand is part of a consortium awarded funding from the UK government to develop 5G infrastructure for an Open RAN project. CommAgility is part of the 5G DU-Volution project, which will evolve distributed unit (DU) devices to meet emerging industry requirements including reduced power, smaller footprint, improved spectrum efficiency and lower latency. CommAgility was chosen for the project due to its capabilities in 5G PHY and stack hardware and software, and it will be contributing its extensive 5G baseband processing software portfolio and expertise to enable the development of the DU.

The 5G DU-Volution project aims to integrate products into a DU component ready for deployment in 5G networks. The consortium is led by ADVA Optical Networking. Other partners alongside CommAgility are AccelerComm, British Telecom, the University of York, and Scotland5GCentre. The consortium partners were awarded the funding as one of the winning teams in the UK's Future Radio Access Network Competition (FRANC).

The UK government has recently announced a joint ambition, with mobile network operators, for 35% of the UK’s mobile network traffic to be carried over open and interoperable RAN architectures by 2030. Open RAN (O-RAN) splits the equipment needed for the Radio Access Network (RAN) into multiple components, including the DU. This undertakes much of the signal processing to convert radio signals to data that can be transported over optical and wireline networks to the core network.

“Open RAN is a key enabler in developing 5G infrastructure, and creating flexible, efficient 5G networks,” said Edward Young, Senior Vice President and Managing Director at CommAgility. “We’re proud to be part of the 5G DU-Volution project, and we look forward to working closely together with our partners.”