First Full Open RAN Stack Solution For Private 5G Networks Launched By SRS
Irish 5G RAN software specialist SRS has launched a new portable, scalable, full stack CU+DU software solution for private networks. srsRAN Enterprise 5G, developed entirely in-house at SRS and with no third party components, is squarely aimed at meeting the needs of the growing Private and Enterprise 5G market, which saw a 40% jump in revenues in 2023 compared to 2022, according to analyst firm Dell’Oro. The Open RAN solution, first demoed at MWC24 earlier this year, promises to ensure indoor and outdoor connectivity across large deployments and support for diverse networks of users.
The hype surrounding private networks is still growing despite the gloom that currently engulfs the telecom infrastructure market. The transition to Industry 4.0 combined with a more technology focused enterprise sector, is creating new opportunities for CSPs and vendors to address this growing segment. Indeed, Dell’Oro Group predicts Private Networks are set for a 21% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) while Analysys Mason thinks the market will grow from some 4,000 deployments today to over 60,000 in five years time. This would see spending rise from $1 billion a year to $9 billion a year by 2028.
That being said, cost effectiveness and a more sophisticated set of services beyond simply enhancing quality of connectivity will be key to succeeding in a space still dominated by a few industry giants. But as SRS CEO Paul Sutton notes, “The way we build mobile networks is changing. By harnessing the opportunity that Open RAN presents, we can build networks in a different way, (…) using off-the-shelf hardware and open interfaces, and even customising to meet their specific needs.”
This is clearly reflected in the srsRAN Enterprise 5G features. These include RAN slicing with dynamic and static Physical Resource Blocks (PRB) assignment, 5G New Radio (NR) Positioning, and, in a move that taps into another much hyped technology today, capabilities for 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) with 3GPP Release 17-based support of both GEO and LEO satellites.
In true Open RAN fashion, the solution isn’t limited to a single compute platform, processor type or instruction set architecture either. The SRS product is fully portable across architectures including Intel (Xeon, Core), AMD (Ryzen, Epyc), ARM (Ampere Altra), AWS Graviton, Nvidia Grace and NXP Layerscape.
Deployment options are equally flexible and include vRAN on any Linux OS, CloudRAN as a CNF with Kubernetes/Helm support, in small cells with L1 SoCs supported via FAPI interface, for acceleration with optional ACC100 and vRAN Boost integration, in radios with fronthaul split-8 and O-RAN split 7.2, and at the Baseband with deployment on Intel/AMD/ARM hardware.
Encouragingly, six radio vendors have already been integrated and tested. These include Benetel, Picocom, Foxconn, LiteOn, and VVDN.
