The UK government announced a competition initiative offering up to £80 million to tackle key barriers to adoption of open mobile networks, marking the next phase of wider R&D funding of the approach.
It stated the funding is part of a £250 million pot reserved for open networks R&D, which backs the 5G Telecoms Supply Chain Diversification Strategy it launched in 2020 in the wake of a decision to ban Chinese vendor Huawei from next-generation networks.
The Open Networks Ecosystem competition will aim to allocate the £80 million in three areas.
First are High Density Demand sites, which the government said represents the most challenging environments for the technical performance of RAN elements and systems. The aim is to develop, demonstrate and test approaches for optimising open RAN network performance in these areas.
Second, the project will target radio frequency…
