Back in mid 2025, the US Department of War said it would open request for proposal to build an open source RAN stack, for a project called OCUDU, which stands for Open Centralised Unit Distributed Unit – the DU-CU being the baseband components of a Radio Access Network (RAN).
Launching the RFP in April, Tom Rondeau, head of the Pentagon’s FutureG Office, said “What Linux did for breaking open the internet and what Kubernetes did for allowing us access to cloud, we need to have the same kind of transformative technology for wireless communications,”
“Allowing us access to cloud, we need to have the same kind of transformative technology for wireless communications,” Tom Rondeau, head of the Pentagon’s FutureG Office.
The next the industry heard of OCUDU was in September, when DeepSig and Software Radio Systems – two companies covered in the past on TMN – announced they had been awarded a contract under the National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) Spectrum Forward OTA, on behalf of the FutureG Office within the Office of the Under Secretary of WAR for Research and Engineering.
A report in TMN’s newsletter on 3 October 2025 said, “Through this award, DeepSig will partner with leading RAN software developer Software Radio Systems (SRS) to deliver a RAN software stack for 5G, 6G, and AI-RAN, in coordination with The Linux Foundation.”
The aim of the award was to accelerate the development of an open-source 5G/6G Distributed Unit (DU) and Central Unit (CU) ecosystem, and to strengthen U.S. capabilities while empowering government, industry, and the research community to drive new wireless innovation and rapidly prototype Next-G capabilities into a common open stack.
DeepSig CEO Jim Shea said, “By combining the strength of the srsRAN community with DeepSig’s AI-native expertise, we will deliver an open CU and DU reference implementation that advances interoperability, security and fuels innovation across defense applications and the broader global wireless ecosystem.”
“With the OCUDU initiative, we are creating the ‘Linux of RAN’ — a neutrally-governed, carrier-grade, and open-source software platform for 5G, 6G, and beyond. By transitioning our proven srsRAN software to the Linux Foundation and partnering with AI-RAN experts DeepSig, we are ensuring a transparent, secure, and sustainable ecosystem that will align public and private sector goals while supporting innovation at scale,” said Paul Sutton, CEO of Software Radio Systems (SRS).
The companies said that under this effort, significant investments will be made to expand, harden, and test the OCUDU feature set and capabilities, as well as to engage with a wide range of partners to evaluate and adopt the OCUDU RAN platform.
So what are the aims, and the possible impact of OCUDU?
A paper from the two companies said, “By combining production-ready, carrier-grade, open-source CU/DU software that operates across multiple vendors (e.g., Intel/AMD x86, ARM, NVIDIA, and other architectures), OCUDU enables anyone to develop custom network solutions on their preferred hardware, delivering commercial solutions that are more interoperable and customizable at the open-source software level.”
OCUDU goes open source – major partners join
Fast forward to the eve of MWC 2026, and the US Goverment’s OCUDU project is now officially formed the Linux Networking Foundation (LFN).
This took the form of the OCUD Ecosystem Foundation, as announced on the LNF website. The OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, as it sounds, takes the US government’s original project and gives it a home, and a lot more members – including some major names from the mobile technology ecosystem.
These include Nvidia, which mentioned the Foundation as part of a wider release which listed out most of its recent partner activity around AI-RAN and 6G. Nvidia said
There was also Ericsson, out the gate with a release of its own, and providing some context of its own. It said that OCUDU aims to accelerate U.S. leadership in wireless innovation through a portable, open-source CU/DU software stack supporting next-generation RAN capabilities. It said it would “help shape” OCUDU’s direction, to “advance an open and interoperable ecosystem defining the progression of 5G and the emergence of 6G toward a 6G/AI intelligent fabric.”
A quote from Rondeau, Principal Director for the DoW’s FutureG Office, said that the overall vision of OCUDU will be met “in part” by the Ecosystem Foundation., “The OCUDU Initiative is building the base layer software technology stack upon which 6G and future networks can provide scalable commercial-grade connectivity to the DoW and public network consumers in the U.S. and around the world” .
“This vision will be realised in part through the formation of the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation. Through these partnerships, the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation will help guide development of this open, AI-enabled software stack and enable the DoW to rapidly field networks of the future required to establish dominance in battle and the global economic landscape.”
The LNF said the programme’s key objectives are:
- Create a public-private commercial and research ecosystem and an open source stack for open source CU and DU
- House the OCUDU Project and other associated open source projects over time
- Foster global collaboration across all areas in the RAN along with end-to-end solutions based on super blueprints across other open source foundations (including documentation, testing, integration and the creation of other artifacts) that aid the development, deployment, operation or adoption of the open source project.
Going open source – SRS code now in Kubernetes
Other vendors in the Foundation include Nokia, which raises the obvious question – what will the business impact be for these two major RAN vendors (and any others that join the Foundation) of effectively contributing to an open source RAN software build.
For its part SRS has already open sourced its RAN code, which has been fully taken over by the LNF. This blog post from SRS Devops Engineer Nils Fürste explains, “The Linux Foundation took over the srsRAN Project codebase. The project was renamed to OCUDU, and the srsRAN Project is now deprecated.” A change of license also means users can take the code and build their own products without paying license fees or having to publish derived work.
“You will often see OCUDU described as the Linux of RAN. Technically, this means it aims to play the role of a common, open base layer. Not a product, not a vendor solution, but infrastructure that others can build on, extend, and integrate,” Fürste explained.
In this post from October, 2025, SRS says this is how OCUDU will roll out:
- v1.0: Coming in March 2026, the first OCUDU release will transition the existing srsRAN CU/DU to the new BSD 3 Clause OpenMPI license and establish the project under the Linux Foundation with neutral governance. Building on the complete and self-contained srsRAN software stack, it will offer a portable, scalable, and standards-aligned software platform that runs on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. This release will set a solid baseline for ongoing feature set expansion, performance enhancements, and community-driven development.
- v2.x: Over the course of two and a half years, a new release will be delivered every 6 months. These incremental releases will add support for advanced capabilities, including massive MIMO (32T32R and 64T64R), Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), RedCap, Carrier Aggregation, and GPU acceleration.
- Validation at every step: Each release will undergo rigorous third-party testing in partnership with NTIA-funded O-RAN Test Laboratories, O-RAN Alliance Open Test and Integration Centers (OTICs), and National Science Foundation (NSF) Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) testbeds. These facilities provide open, vendor-neutral environments for verifying functionality, interoperability, and performance in both controlled and over-the-air conditions. Together, they ensure that OCUDU evolves as a robust and fully validated open RAN platform.
SRS announced that it will have six live demos at MWC Barcelon 2026 showcasing OCUDU across a diverse range of applications, deployed in the cloud and at the edge on a wide range of hardware. These include interference cancellation and detection with ISCO International, and other use cases that involve EANTC, I14y Lab, Viavi, Canonical, Ampere, SUSE, Project Sylva, Supermicro, Intel, Deutsche Telekom, Coherent, Wind River, AI-RAN Alliance and NVIDIA.
OCUDU MEMBERS
The full list of OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation members, many of whom them known to TMN readers, is:
Leading members: AMD, AT&T, DeepSig, Ericsson, Nokia, NVIDIA, Softbank, SRS and Verizon
General members: 1Finity, Aalyria, Abside Networks, Airspan, Altio Labs, Booz Allen, Cirrus360, Cisco, Cohere Technologies, ISCO International, JMA Wireless, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, ORAN Development Company, Raycom Wireless, Radisys, Red Hat, Sempre.ai, Skylark Wireless, T-Mobile, and Viavi.
Why OCUDU now?
There’s little doubt that the primary focus of the US government is to foster a future RAN ecosystem that competes strongly with or locks out the Chinese vendors, fosters US innovation, and gives it deployment capabilities within its own defence, public safety and critical enterprise environments.
We’re seeing efforts to exert US funding over an area of wireless which successive governments have felt creates a strategic weakness in the US. For the vendors, it’s clear which tune is currently being played, and the line that requires falling in behind. If you want US business, align with this administration – but by being in the project you can also help shape direction and keep track of where developments are. And the project also aligns in some strategic outlook with the AI-Native Wireless Networks (AI-WIN) project, an “all-American” AI-RAN stack to accelerate the path to 6G, so it’s not as if this is all new.
But it’s also clear that there are real hopes that this can form the start of a different approach to fostering innovation in the wireless space, and create a different dynamic for software companies and those developing interesting new wireless technology to enter the space, and engage with an operator, enterprise and government customer base.
