New move in open RAN from Nokia and AT&T partnership

AT&T is working with vendor Nokia to hone its focus on opening up the radio access network. 

In a look ahead at 2019 priorities, AT&T called out its work to replace vendor-specific routers with custom units. "In 2019, we plan to deploy thousands of these 'white box' routers on towers across our network," the company said in a statement. "This year is about the power of open source in a 5G world."

The initial focus of the partnerships is developing a RAN Intelligent Controller. 

"Nokia is a strong proponent of RAN network openness and has been active in numerous open source communities, contributing code and defining open interface specifications," Nokia's Mike Murphy, CTO for North America, said in a statement. "We are excited to be partnering with AT&T to co-create RIC software and share with the open-source community to foster further collaboration and innovation." 

AT&T cellsite routers seems to be its mega plan to bring convergence in 5G networks, which are in principle access agnostic and designed with inclusive approach for other access technologies, said Chief technology consultant of Fundarc Communication (xgnlab), Saurabh Verma. He also add that open source communities will drive the whole ecosystem as AT&T is going to rely on its own created baby ONAP for VNF management. VNF which going to take up much of RAN functionality where Nokia is also endeavoring to come with open source communities.