The agreement between the two organisations is designed to bring to market open, intelligent and secure RAN solutions that will help democratise radio access in the spirit of the open RAN philosophy.
Networking solutions vendor Juniper Networks recently signed an exclusive global license agreement with Turk Telekom covering RAN technology, expertise and commercial deployment commitment to advance the shift towards open RAN, 5G and cloud-native networks.
In addition, Türk Telekom has committed to purchase Juniper products and solutions to support its next-generation open RAN and 5G deployment. This will include an initial proof-of-concept (PoC) project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Junipers broader portfolio.
According to the two companies, the partnership comprises an exclusive global licensing agreement with Netsia, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group company Argela in the USA, to transfer its leading-edge radio intelligent controller (RIC) technology to Juniper, including related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products and solutions that integrate with RIC.
The permanent transfer of technical domain experts from Netsia to Juniper in support of RICs integration into Junipers product portfolio, further strengthens Junipers Open RAN and 5G expertise.
Speaking about the agreement, Ümit Önal, Chief Executive Officer, Türk Telekom, said: We have been working for a long time on cutting-edge RIC technologies that will play an active role in setting global 5G standards. The software developed by Netsia provides high capacity, scalable, flexible, personalised network and service solutions for the mobile communication needs of the future. We have achieved a strong synergy with the combination of Netsias know-how and productization capacity with Junipers customer network and geographic reach. As Türk Telekom Group, we are incredibly happy to offer our products, which are the achievements of Turkish engineering, to the world.
RIC technology helps to operationalise open RAN by providing intelligent, cloud-based control of disaggregated and virtualised radio functions across the access and edge domains. It is also an important component of end-to-end network slicing, enabling tuning of various radio access resources to reliably deliver against granular service level agreements (SLAs) for specific use cases. In addition, RIC unlocks innovation in the radio domain by leveraging both near-real-time and non-real-time user and network data to create and deploy innovative, AI-driven applications and services.
Collectively, the products and solutions resulting from this agreement will enable Türk Telekom and other service providers to deploy open, intelligent 5G radio infrastructure, eventually strengthening the open RAN and 5G ecosystem.
Ray Mota, Principal Analyst, ACG Research, added: As service providers expand on their 5G coverage, they continue to look at ways to run their networks more efficiently with open flexibility while looking at ways to optimise profitability. Deploying open RAN is an integral part of a service providers open network architectural journey, removing the traditional hardware lock-in and moving to vendor-neutral hardware- and software-defined technology. Junipers onboarding of the Radio Intelligent Controller in partnership with Türk Telekom is vital for boosting the open RAN ecosystem and driving improved service profitability and experience for service providers.
Juniper and Türk Telekom are equally committed to the importance of open and agile architectures, in particular, the evolution of vRAN architectures in the open RAN community. Juniper and Netsia are both active members of the O-RAN Alliance.
Rami Rahim, Chief Executive Officer, Juniper Networks, explained: Juniper believes that assuring the right service experience is key for monetising the next decade of 5G applications. Development and integration of world-class RIC technology bring this vision another step closer by enabling the combination of end-to-end network slicing and the power of AI-driven service experience. Our dynamic collaboration with Türk Telekom and Netsia is founded on shared principles of an open approach to technology development, the fundamental importance of disaggregation and programmability and the drive toward a cloud-native infrastructure from the telco cloud into the services edge and radio networks. In short, our organisations agree that the cloud is the network and the network is the cloud.
The agreement between the two organisations is designed to bring to market open, intelligent and secure RAN solutions that will help democratise radio access in the spirit of the open RAN philosophy. This one-of-a-kind partnership between a supplier and a customer is also a testimony to new ways of collaboration and joint innovation which is required to accelerate the ecosystem towards widespread deployment of cost-effective, open and best-of-breed infrastructure as service providers and enterprises embrace the cloud, 5G and AI era.
