DOCOMO will collaborate with AT&T, Verizon and Jio to accelerate Open RAN deployment with award from the US’s NTIA

We are honored to share that DOCOMO is part of a consortium led by AT&T and Verizon and co-founded with Reliance Jio that has been awarded grant from the US Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for Open RAN testing and evaluation as the ACCoRD (Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments) project, and are excited to be engaged in an initiative to accelerate Open RAN deployment at scale.

The grant comes as part of the first Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO #1) of the Innovation Fund, which is a ten-year 1.5 billion US dollar grant program funded through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.

The representatives of the mobile operator and the U.S. government with Abeta of NTT DOCOMO^※１

The consortium which was awarded a grant amounting to $42.3 million US dollars and the suppliers of the project represent a diverse and global ecosystem including international operators, US universities and both big incumbents and smaller/newer vendors from Japan, US, India and Europe.

The panel session of the award ceremony

DOCOMO has deployed multi-vendor RAN nation-wide from LTE times, pioneered the activities for open and interoperable RAN continuing into 5G era by launching the O-RAN ALLIANCE as a founding member and deploying the world’s first open RAN for 5G commercial service, and intends contributing to the consortium based on such experiences.

Open and interoperable RAN helps innovative and competitive solutions to be developed and adopted for the mobile network, and moreover induces a vibrant supplier ecosystem, which we believe is essential for the industry to sustainably cater to diversifying services and increasing data demands.
Today, we are observing industry efforts on standardization, product/solution development and trial/commercial deployments related to Open RAN on a level which we have never seen before. We are thrilled to see it’s potential to scale globally.
At the same time, we note that multi-vendor integration and deployments are new for most operators and vendors globally, and that the testing efforts to ensure commercial level performance/quality is one of the main hurdles towards Open RAN deployments.
In this respect, we fully welcome the intent of the Innovation Fund to help the industry in pursuing testing and integration for Open RAN. It also aligns with our intentions with OREX which we have created with our partner vendors to provide Open RAN to operators worldwide.

Going forward, DOCOMO will collaborate as part of the consortium with the aim of realizing interoperability between big incumbents and smaller/newer vendors, e.g. with open fronthaul interface for both classical radios and massive MIMO type radios and with open X2/Xn interface, to accelerate Open RAN deployment at scale.