What is O-RAN Alliance? What do They Do?

Working Groups & Initiatives of O-RAN Alliance

Sunku R
7 min readDec 5, 2021

O-RAN alliance has been founded by operators across the world, AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange and have become a world-wide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research & academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry.

Figure 1: O-RAN Architecture (source)

O-RAN alliance’s mission is to re-shape the RAN industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and fully interoperable mobile networks. To achieve this, O-RAN ALLIANCE is active in 3 main streams:

  • The specification effort => extending RAN standards towards openness and intelligence
  • O-RAN Software Community => development of open software for the RAN (in cooperation with the Linux Foundation)
  • Testing and integration effort => supporting O-RAN member companies in testing and integration of their O-RAN implementations

O-RAN focuses on technical aspects of the RAN and stays neutral in any political, governmental or other areas of any country or region. O-RAN does its innovation and work through many of the technical working groups. It has published the architecture as indicated in Figure 1 and the O-RAN specification work has been divided across technical workgroups, all of them under…

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