How Baicells and Red Hat are driving connectivity and wireless accessibility for a 5G future

As 5G technologies become more prevalent in propelling radio access network (RAN) capabilities, the question remains, how can this technology be made more accessible worldwide? For the past seven years, Baicells has been working to bring high-speed internet to organizations and end-users across the world, including areas lacking internet connectivity. To continue this effort, 5G technologies need a powerful open RAN ecosystem to establish broad network interoperability and provide internet in a variety of use cases.

Through their participation in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), Red Hat and Baicells are contributing to the development of open, disaggregated and standards-based solutions that can enable any organization, anywhere, to interoperate with available 5G solutions and unlock open RAN innovation. 

The power of an open RAN ecosystem 

The TIP Community Lab at Telkom University is at the epicenter of the convergence of innovative 5G technologies that are helping to drive the emerging industrial transformation in Indonesia. By bringing together connectivity stakeholders to test and validate solutions developed by the TIP community, the TIP Community Lab at Telkom University is supporting a growing local ecosystem of vendors pursuing the common goal of building more accessible 5G networks enabled by open RAN. These open RAN vendors are providing products and services that can interoperate with one another - meaning that 5G networks will not be built by a single vendor, but rather an ecosystem of wireless vendors, giving network operators the freedom to build 5G networks in a manner that best suits each particular deployment scenario. 

Open RAN requires an open and collaborative ecosystem to successfully combine the necessary elements of 5G networks and support interoperability. By working together to develop open RAN technologies, Red Hat and Baicells can help cut the costs of deploying 5G technologies to improve return on investment for operators installing the networks. 

Working at the TIP Community Lab at Telkom University, Red Hat and Baicells can  produce proof of concepts for 5G and RAN solutions based on their combined technology offerings, such as: 

• Red Hat OpenShift, providing a leading enterprise Kubernetes application platform with full-stack automated operations, including GitOps integration, that is cloud agnostic to deliver a more consistent experience. OpenShift enables easier network deployments, simplified workflows and greater scalability, agility and flexibility for RAN and RIC services to get to market faster.

• The Baicells RAN solution, offering wireless and 5G network operators with an end-to-end open RAN platform that covers mobile devices, software, applications, Multi-RAN's indoor/outdoor small cells, CPEs, routers, cloud-core networks, network management, and online billing systems. Baicells RAN is a vendor validated cloud-native network function (CNF) on OpenShift, designed to be “Plug and Play” and provide a clear path towards commercial adoption. In addition, Baicells RAN is powered by Intel’s FlexRAN™ reference architecture. 

The future of open RAN 

Virtualization and cloud-native deployment models are the key factors that are allowing this open wireless ecosystem to occur. Red Hat and Baicells are both committed to fostering open collaboration across a diverse ecosystem to support the future of open RAN and 5G innovation. Baicells RAN design principles are based on open front-haul/mid-haul hardware interfaces supporting inter-vendor interoperability by promoting API standardization to avoid dependency on proprietary hardware and contribute to improving return on investment for 5G deployments. 

By pairing Baicells RAN software with Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can access a robust container-based architecture to deploy 5G and RAN solutions on a cloud environment that best meets their needs. Collaborating across the ecosystem helps to further expand functionality across hardware and network infrastructures. 

Learn more about Red Hat’s view of the telecommunications ecosystem. 

“Baicells is delighted to be building a vRAN end-to-end 5G NR system on top of Red Hat OpenShift. Together, we have built several successful proof-of-concept projects and we foresee an increasing market need for this solution. Baicells’ vRAN solution fully supports open RAN architecture and is ready to be adapted for cloud architecture deployments. We are part of the 5G ecosystem, and we plan to keep enabling more ecosystem partners. At Baicells, we explore, we evolve and we keep connecting,” said Lixin Sun, Chairman & CEO at Baicells.