Telefonica invested an undisclosed sum in open virtualised RAN (O-vRAN) specialist Altiostar, as the Spanish operator group moved to accelerate the development of next-generation wireless networks.
The operator stated the investment, made through its Telefonica Innovation Ventures arm, would accelerate its network transformation and to open the doors for “both established and new telecom operators to adopt open, cloud technologies and deploy web-scale networks in the future”.
Telefonica CTIO Enrique Blanco said open RAN would enable the company to create a fully software-based “web-scaled radio access network with unprecedented capacity and performance”.
He added Altiostar is a “one of the fundamental pieces required to expand our network capabilities and make them available to our customers at the speed of software”.
Ashraf Dahod, president and CEO of Altiostar, said operators need to “embrace new innovative solutions that possess the openness, programmability and automation delivered through a software-defined, cloud-native platform and an open supply chain”.
“We are honoured that a global operator like Telefonica is joining us on the journey of innovation in the RAN industry through disaggregation, network virtualisation and building a multi-vendor open ecosystem”, he added.
Both companies were early members of the O-RAN Alliance [1].
[1] https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/o-ran-alliance-linux-foundation-team-on-software/
