The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has launched £30 million competition to fund projects for the adoption of Open RAN (open radio access network) technology.
It said the Future RAN Competition is aimed at fostering collaboration between international and new homegrown players in the UK’s public telecoms networks.
Open RAN allows equipment from multiple suppliers to be used in 5G networks but there are still barriers to it being used over more traditional mobile network technology.
DCMS has called for proposals that could include exploring issues around power efficiency, the management of radio wave spectrum resource, the availability of advanced software platforms, systems integration and security.
This follows the opening last month of a new research facility for the technology to be run by communications regulator Ofcom and the Digital Catapult.
The initiatives are aimed at building a more secure and innovative telecoms supply chain to provide fast connectivity and new data capacity.
Image from iStock, Putilich
