Cohere Technologies’ Chair & CEO Ray Dolan on stage at FYUZZ23 with Vodafone’s De Miguel Albertos (left).
Cohere Technologies, the company that markets “Multi-G” technology that says it can increase the spectral efficiency of 4G and 5G networks, has secured a field trial of its radio access software technology with Vodafone.
Speaking at TIP’s FYUZ summit, Lucia De Miguel Albertos, Open RAN Digital Software and System Development Manager, Vodafone, said, “As we learnt more about programmable networks, we wanted to learn more about Multi-G. In April we launched a press release together with several collaborators to push the open interfaces to improve performance and reconfigure it. We are now in a field phase to test it is real.”
Cohere Technologies’ Chair & CEO Raymond Dolan said that the purpose of the trial is to be able to prove the Multi-G properties of Cohere’s Universal Spectrum Multiplier (USM) technology. That means testing that USM, which improves SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO by using Cohere’s Delay-Doppler timing technology to increase channel prediction accuracy and duration, can work simultaneously with a baseband delivering 4G and 5G.
“We have already proven that it [USM] works in 4G and 5G individually. Now we are going to prove that it works in the same package with you [Vodafone]. So later this year, early next year we’ll demonstrate that we can put these technologies together and allow them to co-exist.
Doing this, Dolan said would show the industry a path to “an open silicon architecture, fully programmable down to Layer One, that scales, and will drive spectral efficiency.”
“And then operators will have a common abstracted Control Plane, that sits above the various PHY layers, that can attach to a service creation layer and allow operators to finally fulfil their drive into the enterprise and industry verticals. We are very excited to do that and appreciate the opportunity to do that with Vodafone.”
Dolan said that Multi-G achieves the goal of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, by allowing 4G and 5G to co-exist in the same spectrum.
“Multi-G means full co-existence of 4G and 5G, trying to fulfil the mission that was initially called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. We know that didn’t end up working out because they were two monolithic technologies that were applied together and competed against each other.
“In a fully programmable network all that competition up and down the stack could have been resolved fully, with software-based changes in the signalling Control Plane and Layer 1, but in isolated packages it ends up backing off the performance of both. In the Multi-G environment, we’re working with Intel to be able to make all those changes and fully align L1 up through the full stack with a common scheduler to show full co-existence of those layers. Once you show that, the question is can you make other things work together, and the answer is yes.
“And when it’s time for a new waveform that might be needed for a specific vertical that wants an optimised stack all the way down to Layer 1, it will attach to a FlexRAN architecture as simply as we’ve been able to attach.”
Bell Canada will probably bring in one of those vendors at the end of the trial. That’s the discussion that’s being had right now
Vendor integration
Dolan also teased the possibility of one of the industry’s main RAN vendors integrating Cohere’s tech with their own baseband. To date, Cohere’s route to market has seemed most likely via the O-RAN RIC – a radio controller that sits above the DU-CU with access to the scheduler. But a direct implementation with a vendor’s RAN would potentially open up a much larger and more timely market for Cohere, and for operators looking to take advantage of its technology.
“Not every operator is ready to go with a RIC. Not every country has the backhaul and fronthaul capabilities, so we’ll have both a local and a RIC based xApp implementation,” he said.
Dolan said that Bell Canada was exploring the idea of asking one vendor to integrate Cohere. And he added that one other North American operator and other global operators were also pressuring the vendor to open up to Cohere.
“We have begun those discission with one of the largest players. It is possible, it’s not trivial, but if the same information that is exchanged in the architecture that we built today is shared across a standard E2 interface, and if we are able to do our math and insert our software and logic, then we can inform a vendor’s scheduler as to what the spatial plane looks like and the same performance will be delivered.”
This, of course, involves an established vendor opening up its scheduler to Cohere’s technology – something that might raise eyebrows in RAN circles.
“Why might that happen? We are focussed right now on FDD because the biggest congestion in the world is on low band FDD networks. To my knowledge there is not anyone out there bringing a product to market that can deliver spectral efficiency benefits in the spatial plane on impaired spectrum. Everyone is working on M-MIMO 64TR: everything we have done so far with Telstra, with Vodafone in the lab and soon the field, and in lab and field trials with Bell Canada, all that is in 4T4R antenna configurations in paired spectrum.”
“Bell Canada will probably bring in one of those vendors at the end of the trial. That’s the discussion that’s being had right now – and it may not happen, these are conflicts and issues that people are going to address. But the opportunity to significantly improve specteal efficiency in low band impaired spectrum right now is so critical that I think at least somebody is going to engage with us. And when they do I believe we will make a huge impact on the industry. ”
Dolan added, “There’s at least two operators supportive of that idea in North America and several around the world that are pushing that vendor to do it.”
You had me at 1.2
In 2020 Cohere’s tech was tested in a single site trial with Deutsch Telekom. A lab test followed with Vodafone in 2021 and the company has also worked in the field with Telstra. These tests included Intel and VMWare who are both investors in the company.
Then in April this year Vodafone leant its support to a press release from Cohere and partners that launched an effort to develop a software programmable L1 stack with disaggregated RAN intelligence and scheduling functions, based on Intel’s FlexRAN platform.
This partnership – known as the Multi-G initiative – was formed to define frameworks, interfaces, interoperability testing, and evaluation criteria that would provide the interfaces to support full coexistence of 4G, 5G, and future waveforms.
Dolan says the company is fully funded to 2025, as investors have been impressed by operator validation of its spectrum multiplier claims.
“When we can spatially multiplex we can achieve 2x performance. The real question is how often we are able to spatially multiplex. There’s a cetain angular separation that’s required, and in a congested site that happens almost all the time, and there are mobility constraints that may or may not happen. But over time we are seeing about a 2x benefit in spectral effciency.
“Most operators say you had me at 1.2, 1.5. Remember there’s a trillion dollars of spectrum in the industry today. If we make a 30% improvement on that it’s a pretty big number, so we have been able to raise significant capital and are funded to the end of 2025.”
