One of the proposed benefits of Open RAN is that, by disaggregating the functional aspects of the radio network, it will foster speedier product innovation and encourage new market entrants.

Keith Dyer, the editor at The Mobile Network, talks to Peter Claydon, Picocom President, about how the company’s award-winning ORANIC board and how it will impact the small cell market.

TMN ‘ORANIC’ interview excerpt:

“The ORANIC is a board designed to underpin O-DUproducts for manufacturers developing these functions for small cells-based Open RAN networks. The PC802 chip that it is based on will be sampling in Q3 this year,” according to Peter Claydon, President, Picocom.

“We’ve got the ORANIC boards now several months ahead of having the chips, which is slightly unusual. But the reason for that is that we have to design the high speed interfaces together as one package with the chip itself, and then do some simulations of everything together to make sure that the interfaces work. And so as part of that you end up designing a board.”

“System integrators can take the board, put it into a standard server, add some RUs on and from a hardware perspective they have a solution that works. There will also be people who need to get into the market with a solution like this,” he added.

Read the full story here.