Diversifying Telecoms: Open Networks R&D Fund announcement

"A new UK telecoms innovation network will be the central docking point for industry to engage with us and the organisations who form part of the telecoms ecosystem, including industry verticals. It will guide businesses and researchers through the UK R&D ecosystem, including directions for relevant funding and investment opportunities, R&D facilities and testbeds, as well as providing high-level insight on how to engage with the opportunity, fund or facilities. The network stands ready to introduce key partners to the people and organisations who are working with us to help you get the most out of what the UK has to offer." More information on UKTIN here. 

"The UK’s continuous pipeline of innovations will further benefit from coordination and assistance in the development of technical standards. This will be supported by the UK telecoms innovation network to ensure that the specifications and intellectual property generated from our partners goes to inform standards development activities in fora and groups such as 3GPP, ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance. Essentially helping us and your business to monitor the development of the global market to understand whether further steps are necessary to support greater adherence and adoption of industry-driven standards for longer-term sustainability."

DCMS Open Networks R&D Fund is already supporting 15 projects through the Future RAN Competition (FRANC) to help accelerate the development of subcomponents and market models for open interface architectures. Its commitment of £36 million "enables a wide range of organisations to focus on developing technical solutions such as radio transmitters, signal processing equipment, power management systems and software to support open interface architectures. The projects are spread across the UK, including in Glasgow, Cardiff, Cambridge, Newcastle, Newport, Slough and Ebbw Vale - building on the existing industrial strength of these regions, while further developing an engineering base with a new set of skills." 

Today's announcement states that the government is "committed to working with key partners to ensure that openness and interoperability are sustained in future communications network architectures." There is investment of up to £25 million through the Future Open Networks Research Challenge to "encourage the UK’s world-class academic researchers and industry to co-create future-facing telecoms technologies that are open and interoperable by default - making the UK an even more attractive place to invest". DCMS sees this funding as enabling a "rich R&D environment from which more patents will be filed by UK-based organisations to continue to support the growth of a stronger domestic telecoms market." The first challenge is a competition for UK/Republic of Korea Open RAN R&D collaboration, worth £1.6 million.

A briefing event for the international Open RAN R&D competition will take place on Wednesday 3 August, 10:00-12:00 - Register here. 

The pioneering research and development of open-interface solutions will, government says, be coupled with a detailed understanding of the domestic market for Open RAN systems. DCMS invites industry to work with them to develop a balanced set of UK-specific Open RAN requirements for end-to-end deployments in high-demand density (HDD) environments. This will help DCMS identify key market and technology gaps, focusing on components, services and appropriate suppliers, that it needs to address to support the deployment of Open RAN in HDD environments.

The outcomes from this activity will underpin future investments by government in supporting further solutions development and trials while at the same time providing smaller suppliers with direction for their product development to better target public network requirements in the UK.

Fundamentally, HDD sites represent the most challenging environments for the technical performance of RAN elements and systems. Through this programme of work DCMS wants to ensure that any new open-interface solutions developed are market-ready and tested to meet the needs of stakeholders responsible for building networks, especially mobile network operators and neutral host providers.

Developing UK-specific requirements will give new and emerging market entrant suppliers greater clarity over the products they must develop to compete in the UK, as defined by their customers, and this greater transparency should make the UK a more appealing market. DCMS aims to maximise this opportunity through international partnerships and collaborative R&D to develop global markets for export and provide an avenue for like-minded partners to contribute to the diversification of the UK’s telecoms supply chain.

The first of these partnerships to be launched is with the Republic of Korea to accelerate the development of power-efficient products and solutions for open interface architectures. DCMS plans to announce additional global partnerships to be announced during the course of the fund. The Department looks forward to engaging with international governments and industry across the world as we develop and implement the measures set out in the Diversification Strategy.

DCMS is committed to its vision that an "open-interface architecture will unlock the supplier lock-in across today’s market" and goes on to say that the industry will need to manage the introduction of additional ‘touch points’ across the network from a security and resilience perspective and new challenges in system integration.

DCMS plans to announce further investment to enable industry to integrate open-interface solutions from different suppliers to work together beyond the laboratory environment, both technically and commercially, to be deployed within public networks. This will give us an early indication on the viability of deploying and maintaining the operations of open interface architectures against the security and performance requirements for public telecoms providers’ networks and services.

How this will interface with the extensive new security framework as enacted in the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 is left unsaid.

The SmartRAN Open Networks Interoperability Centre (SONIC Labs) is designed to help commercialise open-interface solutions and test their performance. DCMS has committed £16 million to establish SONIC Labs as a commercially-neutral, collaborative environment for open, disaggregated and software-centric network solutions and multi-vendor architectures. It is maintained and operated by Digital Catapult and Ofcom to provide testing services for suppliers and empowers the wider community to demonstrate their equipment to the standards demanded by the network operators. DCMS, Digital Catapult and Ofcom is designing and building this facility for long-term capability with the intention to make a lasting impact.

DCMS shares an update on the long-awaited UK Telecoms Lab (UKTL) which is being established to "support and inform UK security and supply chain diversification ambitions". The UKTL will enable both security evaluations of equipment and functional and secure interoperability testing, reducing barriers to the deployment of open-interface solutions. DCMS encourages businesses and researchers to use the UKTL to evaluate the security of telecoms equipment before deployment, and to take advantage of their guidance on mitigation measures where security falls short. We await further details on how public network operators are engaged and involved in what is essentially a test lab for their own networks and future  equipment use. 

Early progress in this space is demonstrated by the commitment by DCMS to work with NEC - one of the leading suppliers of Open RAN equipment - to implement and demonstrate the performance of a ‘neutral host’ Open RAN solution in outdoor rural environments. This project builds on NEC’s recent strategic investments to establish both a Global Open RAN Centre of Excellence and 5G Radio R&D Centre in the UK.

The NeutrORAN project has established a testbed for a multi-operator, neutral host solution in Wales including in Cefn Du and Menai Science Park (M-Sparc). This ‘neutral host’ solution is showcasing a more cost efficient way to deliver capacity and coverage to underserved regions with the potential for the architecture and deployment model to be scalable beyond the UK.

Alongside NeutrORAN and other industry-led commercial trials and deployments for Open RAN, DCMS will be offering up to £22 million to collaboratively trial open-interface solutions in high demand density environments across the UK (as listed above under "Accelerating Maturity". These real-world trials will look to "utilise the test cases derived from the initial HDD requirements gathering exercise as set out by network operators and other network builders... (to) provide a crucial assessment of market readiness of the open-interface solutions and help analyse the capacity of the systems integration ecosystem in the UK. These technological developments and trials represent an opportunity for the UK to grow presence and influence within the global supply chain itself."