Altiostar Expands UK Lab to Extend 4G, 5G Open RAN Capabilities

Altiostar is expanding its UK-based open virtual radio access network (open vRAN) engineering lab by hiring new staff to support expanded software development, customer support and testing activities.

Altiostar's UK development lab was opened in 2012 and is located in Weybridge south of London. It is strategically located in one of the worldwide hot spots for RAN development.

The lab is outfitted for remote radio unit (RRU) integration testing with Altiostar software, and certification with standards bodies and regulatory agencies. The lab has in the past regularly hosted customer visits to conduct RRU testing. Moving forward, it will be a key location to support customer deployments taking place in the UK.

Altiostar is expanding its UK-based open vRAN lab in one of the worldwide hot spots for RAN development. Altiostar's investment into its UK location follows the findings of the UK government's Telecoms Diversification Taskforce in April 2021.

The taskforce published the 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy, where it outlined the intention to build a healthy, innovative and competitive 5G supply chain going forward.

Altiostar UK office personnel also work closely with a number of partners that have a presence in the UK and Ireland. Altiostar is collaborating with NEC on a number of 5G deployments and also the NEC OpenRAN Global Centre of Excellence. In addition, Altiostar is partnering with Aspire Technology, an Open RAN professional services company headquartered in Dublin, to conduct independent interoperability and end to end testing for radios.

"The Altiostar UK location has played a key role in the development and testing of new software features for all of our customers," said Kana Muhunthan, Senior Director of Radio Product Development at Altiostar. "The growth of this office reflects the importance of open vRAN to the future of the mobile wireless industry. The UK is a great location for attracting developer talent and we are committed to continue to grow our presence in this region."

Altiostar provides 4G and 5G open virtualized RAN (Open vRAN) software that supports open interfaces and virtualizes the radio access baseband functions to build a disaggregated multi-vendor, web-scale, cloud-based mobile network.

Operators can add intelligence, quickly adapt the network for different services and automate operations to rapidly scale the network and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Altiostar collaborates with a growing ecosystem of partners to support a diverse Open RAN supply chain.

Altiostar Open vRAN solution has been deployed globally, including the world's first cloud-native commercial-scale mobile network with Rakuten Mobile in Japan.