EC News DeskJuniper Networks and Türk Telekom have announced completion of new technology and commercial partnership to accelerate innovation in support of the Open RAN, Radio Access Network, 5G ecosystem. The partnership comprises an exclusive global licensing agreement with Netsia, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group company Argela in the US, to transfer its Radio Intelligent Controller, RIC, technology to Juniper. It will also include related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products and solutions that integrate with RIC.
The partnership will enable permanent transfer of technical domain experts from Netsia to Juniper in support of RIC’s integration into Juniper’s product portfolio, further strengthening Juniper’s Open RAN and 5G expertise. Committed purchase of Juniper products and solutions by Türk Telekom to support its next generation Open RAN and 5G deployment is also a part of agreement. This will include an initial proof-of-concept project expected in late 2021, which will incorporate RIC technology and Juniper’s broader portfolio.
RIC technology helps to operationalise Open RAN by providing intelligent, cloud-based control of disaggregated and virtualised 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 Service Level Agreements for specific use cases.
In addition, RIC unlocks 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 will 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, the innovations resulting from this agreement will further extend Juniper’s network slicing capabilities across the radio, transport and telco cloud domains. It paves the way for Juniper 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 will lay the foundation for service providers to deliver secure, assured service experience for thousands of applications based on a multi-tenant, multi-cloud, multi-domain and any-access infrastructure, opening up new monetisation and innovation opportunities.
