Parallel Wireless emerges as winner in DSIT’s Open Network Ecosystem contest
Parallel Wireless, a US-based firm in the Open RAN space, has won the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) Open Network competition (ONE) with its project AURA (Agile Universal Radio Architecture). The company says the win will enable it to rapidly grow its UK team and advance technologies to adopt 5G.
The ONE competition is a component of the government’s Open Networks R&D Fund, which addresses barriers to mobile network adoption. It targets three key challenge areas such as high demand density use cases, RAN intelligent controllers and processors, RF and other RAN hardware.
Parallel Wireless CEO Steve Papa highlights the impact of DSIT’s ONE competition in spurring telecoms innovation.
“Our project AURA will enable scalable manufacturing of telecoms equipment in the UK, drive down costs for mobile operators to enable more OpenRAN 5G deployments and reduce the significant Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions from operating wireless networks,” comments Papa.
Project AURA is a collaborative effort led by Parallel Wireless, Kandou Bus and British Telecom. It aims to create a versatile, power-efficient radio solution that adapts to various frequency bands and form factors. The main goal is to manufacture the product competitively in the UK.
Nicolas Scheidecker, the head of UK R&D, is pleased that DSIT selected their project AURA to win the ONE competition.
“The competition funding will help us and our partners grow our multidisciplinary UK teams to bring to market a significantly differentiated and highly innovative radio,” adds Scheidecker. “Our vision is that this product will improve the energy efficiency of our customer’s networks whilst supporting the industrial strategy of the UK.”
In related news, Wind River, a mission-critical intelligent systems software provider, announced a new partnership with Vodafone in September. Wind River Studio will be used in Vodafone’s Open RAN deployment across Wales and South West England.
Wind River Studio, a cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture, is built on the open-source StarlingX project and is touted for its ability to manage distributed edge networks at scale. The software addresses the complexities of deploying and managing physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure for delivering traditional RAN performance in a vRAN/Open RAN setting.
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