Progress report: O-RAN Alliance goes for bronze

The organisation rounds up its advances, from new and updated standards to a white paper outlining use cases and deployment scenarios.

According its half yearly report on progress, โ€œO-RAN working groups and the O-RAN Software Community have extensively engaged to achieve tight alignment between the specifications and the Bronze release open source codeโ€.

In June, working with the Linux Foundation, the O-RAN SW Community published its second software release, Bronze, which supports new elements of the O-RAN architecture and provides updates to align with the latest O-RAN specifications.

The details are here.

Building consensus

โ€œThe new use cases, the Bronze software release, and the new O-RAN Alliance members are indications that this global forum is working exactly as intended, reaching across borders to drive innovation and build consensus,โ€ said Andre Fuetsch, Chairman of the O-RAN Alliance and CTO โ€“ Network Services, AT&T.

He added, โ€œAs this coalition evolves, we look forward to seeing how it continues to broaden access to 5G and other new access technologies.โ€

The Alliance has also welcomed new members including Canadaโ€™s TELUS Communications and US Cellular, bringing its membership of operators to 26 out of the more then 200 companies engaged in its efforts.

In February 2020 it published the O-RAN Use Cases and Deployment Scenarios white paper introduces the initial set of O-RAN use cases and cloud native deployment support options. The white paper introduces the O-Cloud cloud computing platform that can host relevant O-RAN functions to enable flexible deployment options in virtualized telco clouds.