Benetel, developer of O-RAN radio units (O-RU) for the telecommunications industry, announced its successful demonstration of multi-vendor O-RAN hardware interoperability. This demonstration was carried out at the recent joint O-RAN ALLIANCE and TIP Plugfest, which was simultaneously hosted at the OTIC and TIP community labs located in Berlin, Madrid and Torino.
Benetel engineers undertook the demonstration at the Deutsche Telekom Labs in Berlin. They integrated the company’s RAN500 5G O-RU with the VIAVI TM500 O-RU tester. The RAN500 is a split 7.2x unit implementing O-RAN fronthaul and low PHY (L1) of the 5G stack. For this demonstration, it was operating in the n78 5G frequency band. John Doyle, CTO of Benetel feels O-RAN interoperability is the key challenge for their industry and events, like this Plugfest, are critical for ensuring O-RAN interoperability amongst different vendors. The integration and testing work they have done, in collaboration with VIAVI, represents a major step forward.
Benetel works with leading players and open initiatives, such as the O-RAN ALLIANCE, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA) and Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP) to provide RUs over fronthaul networks that interwork with virtualized baseband units. This open disaggregated RAN is the cornerstone of next-generation mobile network infrastructure.
