ATIS, O-RAN ALLIANCE Agree on Transposition of O-RAN Specifications to ATIS Standards

In what feels like a long overdue move, the O-RAN ALLIANCE announced this week that it signed an MoU with North American standards body ATIS. The MoU establishes a joint process to identify O-RAN specifications for adoption by ATIS. The endorsement from the American organisation, an accredited standards body, is a positive move for the European based O-RAN ALLIANCE following the difficulties it faced in the US a few years ago due to the inclusion of US Government banned entities within its membership structure.

ATIS had previously launched its own Open RAN “Minimum Profile”, an initiative to define a common set of baseline capabilities to simplify the deployment of the technology. The MoU ensures a smoother process for the inclusion of O-RAN specs into North American with the hope this helps accelerate Open RAN deployments. The agreement builds on an earlier MoU addressing cooperation on Open Radio Access Network (RAN) issues, including Open RAN security and stakeholder requirements for Open RAN. Perhaps tellingly, a lot of this work has involved the development of enhanced zero trust architectures for 5G, an increasingly critical area of focus for Open RAN given the multi-vendor environment it aspires to build.
“O-RAN ALLIANCE welcomes ATIS’s transposition of O-RAN specifications to ATIS standards. The MoU ensures technical alignment and supports mutual efforts to enable a truly open RAN ecosystem. North America comes as another region adopting O-RAN specifications and we remain open to similar arrangements with standards authorities in other regions.” said Abdurazak Mudesir, the newly elected Chair of the Board of O-RAN ALLIANCE.