Deutsche Telekom, Red Hat and IBM collaborate on successful O-Cloud trial for open RAN

The parties complete initial key phase for independent O-Cloud development

On its mission to become the leading digital service provider, Deutsche Telekom has pioneered open RAN since it co-founded the xRAN Forum in 2016, leading to the formation of the O-RAN Alliance in 2018. Deutsche Telekom’s goal is to establish multi-vendor O-RAN as a solution for high-power, large-scale macro network deployment as part of its network modernization activities in Europe.

Deutsche Telekom has defined three key pillars in its O-RAN approach to support greater optionality, deployment flexibility and advanced automation:

1. Open fronthaul to implement and enable RAN disaggregation
2. Cloud-based modular workloads with hardware and software separation, via Deutsche Telekom’s O-Cloud blueprint
3. Vendor-independent service management and orchestration (SMO) for consistent, unified control.

Ecosystem collaboration

Deutsche Telekom is cultivating close industry partnerships to bring its goals to life and has multiple activities in play both in the lab and live in the field.

Working together with Red Hat and IBM, Deutsche Telekom has successfully completed its independent O-Cloud proof of concept (PoC) for RAN.

IBM Consulting helped Deutsche Telekom kick off the project in March 2024, conducting scope alignment with Deutsche Telekom and supporting project management, solution design and implementation of essential features of the O-Cloud. These include automation and monitoring of hardware infrastructure and system integration to achieve integrated zero-touch provisioning (ZTP). IBM supported rapid deployment of the solution in Deutsche Telekom’s O-Cloud Lab.

Red Hat OpenShift provides the underlying application platform serving as the operating system and container-as-a-service (CaaS) layer that enables Deutsche Telekom to integrate cloud-native network functions (CNFs) from multiple vendors. Deutsche Telekom is taking advantage of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, OpenShift GitOps, Topology-Aware Lifecycle Manager and integrated observability capabilities to manage and lifecycle-control fleets of workload clusters in a streamlined way. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables zero-touch hardware provisioning so that Deutsche Telekom can speed up deployment and further simplify management. Red Hat OpenShift’s built-in security features include network and container isolation and controlled access to application data across the entire software lifecycle.

The trial was successfully completed as planned within 6 months, showcasing automated lifecycle management and observability capabilities.

Benefits so far

Deutsche Telekom was able to prove that the independent O-Cloud is a robust foundation for its open RAN solution on a number of counts:

• Automation and monitoring requirements are fulfilled for rapid provisioning and deployment with minimal human intervention
• The platform integrates hardware and software with open interfaces
• Flexible, multi-vendor infrastructure provides the freedom to select best-performing supplier solutions continuously

Looking ahead

This project represents Deutsche Telekom’s commitment to building an open, interoperable infrastructure, enabling flexibility in supplier selection and greater operational excellence to meet customer demands in today’s fast-evolving telecom landscape.

The parties have gained a shared understanding of what is needed to build out a full cloud RAN stack adhering to Deutsche Telekom’s blueprint with O-Cloud as an end-to-end target platform for countries in Europe. Ongoing open RAN development is focused on automating onboarding of the centralized unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) and optimizing operational aspects.

We are excited to continue the support of Deutsche Telekom’s mission to establish an open and cloudified RAN solution for high-performance, large-scale mobile networks.

Figure 1. The components of the vertical disaggregation including the O-Cloud