Is VALOR enough to drive Open RAN adoption?
VIAVI officially opened its Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN (VALOR), promising to play a crucial role in helping accelerate the certification process for new market entrants and startups in the US. With the North American market projected to see the biggest growth in Open RAN spending over the next five years, there is an urgent need to widen access to the kind of cutting edge testing capabilities that have so far only been available to large, established players. Sarah Skaluba, a Special Policy Advisor for the NTIA underscored this point at a ceremony held to mark the opening of the lab: “We know testing and evaluation is critical to Open RAN’s success”
VALOR is hoping to address this challenge through a highly automated, on-demand “pay-as-you-go” approach to standardised testing. VIAVI claims the service, first announced in June after a $21.7 million grant from the NTIA Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund’s first Notice of Funding Opportunity was secured, will ultimately offer over 500 O-RAN WG4, WG5, WG11, TIFG and 3GPP compliant test cases for Open RAN with cloud, intelligence, automation and digital twin technology. A recently announced partnership with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) also aims to ensure testing processes are streamlined to avoid unnecessary and costly duplication of work. Crucially, all of this will be accessible remotely, prompting Oleg Khaykin, President and CEO of VIAVI to state that “the VALOR lab is an important step in democratizing Open RAN testing”
Vendors will be able to use the service to schedule tests and generate reports optimised for technology development, system verification and precertification performance, security and pre-deployment simulation. At their disposal is an impressive array of technologies. These include a joint O-RU testbed with Rohde & Schwarz for O-RU conformance and network energy saving tests, a large ETS-Lindgren RF anechoic chamber for Massive MIMO and beamforming over-the-air (OTA) performance testing, and ‘golden’ Open RAN-compliant O-CU, O-DU and O-RU reference technologies from Fujitsu, SOLiD and Capgemini. This is in addition to VIAVI’s Wireless Open RAN Test Suite (NITRO) and its unified framework for hybrid physical and cloud lab testing (VAMOS).
VALOR faces its own test however. Despite strong backing from the US government, the industry’s vision of a truly open and multi vendor RAN is yet to successfully take off at scale in the US, especially amongst incumbents. While the lab may indeed achieve the goal of encouraging new entrants to the Open RAN ecosystem, encouraging CSPs to integrate those new entrants into their networks is likely to prove more difficult, based on current trends.
