Ooredoo and Wind River Trial First-of-its-kind Open RAN Solution for Indoor Coverage in Qatar, Partners with OREX to Pioneer the Networks of the Future

DOHA, Qatar--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As part of its strong commitment to delivering superior network performance and excellence in customer experience, Ooredoo is pioneering a first-of-its-kind field trial in Qatar to test the Open RAN technology specifically tailored for the in-building environment.

Considered as the blueprint for future networks, Open RAN has been already deployed in several markets in Europe and North America - with several trials ongoing in the Middle East region - and promises enhanced flexibility, improved network performance, and cost and energy savings, ultimately benefiting customers with more reliable and efficient connectivity.

However, this implementation is a first-of-its-kind, aiming at delivering on the promises of Open RAN in the in-building environment.

The field trial, set to commence in Q1 2024, will be conducted in cooperation with OREX, the trademark and service brand of NTT DOCOMO Inc for Open RAN. OREX will act the prime Systems Integrator in the field trial with cloud infrastructure software supplied by Wind River, hardware from Dell, acceleration technology from Nvidia, and CU/DU software from Fujitsu. OREX is NTT DOCOMO's Open RAN service brand.

Based on the open source StarlingX project (the only distributed cloud top-tier OpenInfra Project), Wind River Studio provides a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of distributed edge networks at scale. It delivers a foundation to manage a geographically distributed network and simplifies Day 1 and Day 2 operations by providing single-pane-of-glass, zero-touch automated solution. Studio addresses service providers’ complex challenge of deploying and managing cloud-native infrastructure for core-to-edge distributed cloud networks to provide traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN deployment.

In addition to the ongoing collaboration with Ooredoo, Wind River has played key roles in the world’s first successful 5G data session, first Open RAN deployment in Canada; building commercial vRAN/Open RAN programs, and launching the first fully automated edge data center for commercial service. Wind River continues to be a leader in the telecom landscape with its large-scale commercial vRAN/Open RAN deployments.

OREX is a trademark of NTT DOCOMO, INC.