Networking solutions vendor Juniper Networks and telecom operator Türk Telekom have completed their joint “groundbreaking” new technology and partnership to accelerate innovation in support of the Open RAN (Open Radio Access Network) 5G ecosystem.
Netsia, an applied research organization and pioneer in Open RAN and 5G and a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group company Argela in the United States, is an innovator in the RIC landscape, with over 20 patents and patent applications for its technology to date. The Netsia 4G and 5G RIC is in the advanced stage of development following approximately five years of rigorous research and development, and numerous proof-of-concept trials already successfully completed or underway with major service providers around the world.
The technology partnership comprises an exclusive global licensing agreement with Netsia. Türk Telekom will transfer its Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) technology to Juniper Networks, including related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products and solutions that integrate with RIC.
It also comprises committed purchase of Juniper products and solutions by Türk Telekom to support their next generation Open RAN and 5G deployment. This will include an initial proof-of-concept project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Juniper’s broader portfolio.
Technical domain experts from Netsia will be permanently transferred to Juniper Networks in support of RIC’s integration into Juniper’s product portfolio, further strengthening Juniper’s Open RAN and 5G expertise.
“We have been working for a long time on cutting-edge RIC technologies that will play an active role in setting global 5G standards. The software developed by Netsia provides high capacity, scalable, flexible, personalized network and service solutions for the mobile communication needs of the future,” said Ümit Önal, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Türk Telekom. “We have achieved a strong synergy with the combination of Netsia’s know-how and productization capacity with Juniper’s customer network and geographic reach. As Türk Telekom Group, we are incredibly happy to offer our products, which are the achievements of Turkish engineering, to the world.”
RIC Technology, Multi-Cloud
RIC technology helps to operationalize Open RAN by providing intelligent, cloud-based control of disaggregated and virtualized radio functions across the access and edge domains. It is also an important component of end-to-end network slicing, enabling ‘tuning’ of various radio access resources to reliably deliver against granular SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for specific use cases.
In addition, RIC would unlock innovation in the radio domain by leveraging both near-real-time and non-real-time user and network data to create and deploy innovative, AI-driven applications and services.
Collectively, the products and solutions resulting from this agreement would enable Türk Telekom and other service providers to deploy open, intelligent 5G radio infrastructure, eventually strengthening the Open RAN and 5G ecosystem.
Coupled with Juniper’s existing domain orchestration portfolio (NorthStar in the transport domain and Contrail in the data center domain), the innovations resulting from this agreement would further extend Juniper’s network slicing capabilities across the radio, transport and telco cloud domains.
It may pave the way for Juniper Networks to ultimately offer a truly cloud-native, scalable platform with end-to-end network slicing and orchestration across next-generation access, IP transport and core networks. This would lay the foundation for service providers to deliver “secured, assured” service experience for thousands of applications based on a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, multi-domain and any-access infrastructure, opening up new monetization and innovation opportunities.
“Juniper believes that assuring the right service experience is key for monetizing the next decade of 5G applications. Development and integration of world-class RIC technology brings this vision another step closer by enabling the combination of end-to-end network slicing and the power of AI-driven service experience,” said Rami Rahim, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Juniper Networks. “Our dynamic collaboration with Türk Telekom and Netsia is founded on shared principles of an open approach to technology development, the fundamental importance of disaggregation and programmability and the drive toward a cloud native infrastructure from the telco cloud into the services edge and radio networks. In short, our organizations agree that the cloud is the network and the network is the cloud.”
