Dublin, Ireland – 1 March 2021 – Benetel has signed up to participate in the SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre (SONIC), a joint program between Digital Catapult and Ofcom via which the interoperability and integration of various OpenRAN solutions will be validated. SONIC goes into operation in May 2021. It will combine comprehensive laboratory testing capabilities with small-scale implementation activities.
“Benetel is excited to be partnering with Digital Catapult and Ofcom in relation to the SONIC program, and collaborating on real-world OpenRAN deployments. SONIC presents a highly effective platform to ensure OpenRAN deployment readiness for the UK 5G market,” says Adrian O`Connor, CEO of Benetel.
Benetel will provide SONIC with OpenRAN radio units (O-RUs). These will be integrated with products from other solution providers in order to fully demonstrate OpenRAN’s multi-vendor capabilities and the open ecosystem that it supports.
“We welcome Benetel’s involvement in SONIC. Our goal is to ensure multi-vendor OpenRAN interoperability and the availability of advanced, deployment-ready OpenRAN solutions to address the UK 5G market”, states Joe Butler, CTO of Digital Catapult.
Benetel works with leading players and open initiatives, such as the O-RAN Alliance, the OpenAirInterface Software Alliance (OSA), the Telecom Infrastructure Project (TIP), Open RAN Policy Coalition and now SONIC to provide RUs over fronthaul networks that interwork with virtualized baseband units. This open disaggregated RAN is the backbone of next-generation mobile network infrastructure.
For more information about what Benetel offers the mobile communications market please visit https://benetel.com or follow Benetel on LinkedIn for the latest company updates.
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About Benetel
Headquartered in Dublin, the organisation’s technically proficient and highly experienced team drive real innovation in the roll-out of small cell infrastructure. Today, Benetel develops leading-edge radio solutions for 5G and 4G/LTE Small Cells. Benetel is committed to supporting the evolving radio access networks around the world by producing hardware and related services that fully embrace the principle of openness. Offering radio units in a variety of frequency bands and output powers, Benetel enables its customers to get competitive and radically increase their speed to market of the newest network infrastructure.
For more information visit: www.benetel.com
About Digital Catapult
Digital Catapult is the UK’s leading advanced digital technology innovation centre, driving early adoption of technologies to make UK businesses more competitive and productive and grow the country’s economy.
We connect large established companies, startup and scaleup businesses and researchers to discover new ways to solve big challenges in the manufacturing and creative industries. Through this collaboration businesses are supported to develop the right technologies to solve problems, increase productivity and open up new markets faster.
Digital Catapult provides physical and digital facilities for experimentation and testing that would otherwise not be accessible for smaller companies.
As well as breaking down barriers to technology adoption for startups and scaleups, our work de-risks innovation for large enterprises and uncovers new commercial applications in immersive, future networks, distributed ledger, and artificial intelligence technologies. For more information please visit www.digicatapult.org.uk
