Juniper Networks and Türk Telekom to accelerate Open RAN development

Juniper Networks  and Türk Telekom Group (Türk Telekom), Turkey’s integrated telecom operator, have announced completion of a groundbreaking new technology and commercial partnership to accelerate innovation in support of the Open RAN (Open Radio Access Network) 5G ecosystem.

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.
• Permanent transfer of technical domain experts from Netsia to Juniper in support of RIC’s integration into Juniper’s product portfolio, further strengthening Juniper’s Open RAN and 5G expertise.
• Committed purchase of Juniper products and solutions by Türk Telekom to support its next generation Open RAN and 5G deployment. This will include an initial proof-of-concept project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Juniper’s broader portfolio.

Netsia – an applied research organization and pioneer in Open RAN and 5G – is widely regarded as an innovator in the RIC landscape, with over 20 patents and patent applications for its technology to date. The Netsia 4G and 5G RIC is in the advanced stage of development following approximately five years of rigorous research and development, and numerous proof-of-concept trials already successfully completed or underway with major service providers around the world.

RIC technology helps to operationalize Open RAN by providing intelligent, cloud-based control of disaggregated and virtualized 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 SLAs (Service Level Agreements) 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.

Coupled with Juniper’s existing domain orchestration portfolio (NorthStar in the transport domain and Contrail in the data center domain), the innovations resulting from this agreement will further extend Juniper’s network slicing capabilities across the radio, transport and telco cloud domains. It paves the way for Juniper to ultimately offer a truly cloud-native, scalable platform with end-to-end network slicing and orchestration across next-generation access, IP transport and core networks. This will lay the foundation for service providers to deliver secure, assured service experience for thousands of applications based on a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, multi-domain and any-access infrastructure, opening up new monetization and innovation opportunities.

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. The agreement between the two organizations is designed to bring to market open, intelligent and secure RAN solutions that will help democratize 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.