AT&T, Ericsson and 1Finity, the company previously operating as Fujitsu Communications, have announced the integration of a Fujitsu radio unit with Ericsson’s dedicated RAN Compute radio baseband.
AT&T announced in November last year that it would be integrating small cells from both Fujitsu and Mavenir to provide capacity densification in urban areas. This week it said that it had carried out the first call using an RU and baseband from different vendors.
4T/4R, 120W small cell
The test call using the 1finity and Ericsson kit took place in AT&T’s lab. 1finity told TMN that the RU was a 4T/4R C-Band TDD small cell with, 4x 30W RF power. That’s the product that the vendor has been prepping for use in AT&T’s network as it modernises its densification sites.
It also used Ericsson’s dedicated RAN Compute 6672 baseband, rather than a Cloud RAN set up that would see Ericsson’s RAN software deployed on one of its hardware partners such as HPE.
AT&T has also specified a need for dual band FDD small cells, but these have not yet appeared in public in its test roster. The radios must also be managed by Ericsson’s RIC and SMO platform, known as its Intelligent Automation Platform.
Since AT&T announced that Mavenir would also be providing small cells for its network, Mavenir has announced a scaling down of its Radio Unit hardware ambitions, moving away from a design and manufacturing model, but has said that it will keep its commitment for existing and ongoing customer engagements on Open RAN.
For market watchers, clearly the test is a sign a progress and an indication of AT&T’s desire to plug in non-Ericsson elements where fitting into the network. But it is still “only” a lab test, and third party RU-baseband integrations are not regarded as especially challenging any longer, with manufacturers expecting to be able to prove interoperability in much shorter times than was previously the case.
