Google officially joins the O-RAN Alliance to promote the development of telecommunications technology

According to foreign media reports, Google announced on Monday that it has officially joined the O-RAN Alliance. Google said that joining the O-RAN Alliance will enable it to "jointly promote and accelerate" the development of the RAN industry.

The O-RAN Alliance was founded in February 2018 by China Mobile, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange, and was formed by the merger of the original C-RAN Alliance and the xRAN Forum. Its vision is to enable software-based, virtualized, flexible, intelligent and more energy-efficient mobile communication networks by enhancing the openness and intelligence of the radio access network (RAN).

“We believe that an industry-wide open reference architecture and interfaces for the RAN are key to driving innovation in mobile networks for communications service providers (CSPs) – the O-RAN Alliance has driven significant developments in the RAN layer and has gained support from many large CSPs who have become early adopters of the standard,” Google said in a blog post. “The O-RAN specification will also pave the way for enhanced network security and enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem through faster innovation, improving the user experience and unlocking new CSP operating models.”

Specifically, Google will focus on research and exploration of software, 5G, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and network-based AI technologies in O-RAN.