Google Cloud joins O-RAN Alliance to drive innovation across telecom industry

Google Cloud has joined the O-RAN Alliance, a worldwide community of mobile network operators, vendors, and research and academic institutions operating in the Radio Access Network (RAN) industry, to drive transformative change in the telecommunications industry.

"We believe that industry-wide open reference architectures and interfaces for RAN are key to driving innovation across communication service provider (CSP) mobile networks with the O-RAN Alliance driving significant advances in the RAN layer and already gaining traction with a number of large CSPs who have become early adopters of the standard," Google Cloud wrote in a blog post.

Google said that O-RAN specifications will also enable a more competitive and vibrant RAN supplier ecosystem with faster innovation to improve user experience and unlock new CSP operating models.

Google will bring its broad knowledge and expertise to jointly drive and accelerate the realization of O-RAN initiatives. With this partnership, the company is aiming to further solidify O-RAN's journey to achieving truly open cloud software centricity.

Secondly, Google will bring its own experience in building its scaled global network to drive greater innovation and accelerate O-RAN initiatives in the cloud-native networking space.

"Over the past decade, we've seen the network evolve through the emergence of programmability, open APIs, declarative intents and data models, and early software definition of network functions. Over the coming years, we believe this journey will accelerate with the shift to cloud-native networking across the board, bringing in end-to-end multi-domain automation and rich analytics," the company wrote in the post.

Thirdly, Google Cloud is aiming to work with the O-RAN Alliance members to enable cloud-native intelligent networks that are secure, self-driving, and self-healing as companies are set to undergo massive transformation towards an autonomous and self-healing network. Google will bring its wealth of software experience and global leadership to efficiently design, manage, and operate RAN intelligent controllers and network orchestrators.