Parallel Wireless on Wednesday announced a partnership with Etisalat to deliver cloud-native O-RAN compliant 5G 4G 3G 2G Open RAN solutions, in collaboration with Intel and Supermicro, becoming the first in Central Asia to implement Open RAN.
Afghanistan has seen a strong increase in mobile broadband with penetration reaching 22% in 2019 up from 1% in 2013. While mobile broadband is still in its early stages of development, growth is expected in 2022.
In Afghanistan, Parallel Wireless is innovating with ecosystem partners to deliver:
- Easy scale-out and hardware decoupling to provide mobile operators with greater agility, resilience, and portability across cloud environments for greater total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.
- The Open RAN radio hardware ecosystem provides Remote Radio Units (RRUs) that will allow Etisalat to replace legacy 2G/3G/4G systems with white box solutions that can be upgraded to 5G in the future.
- Intel's 3rd Gen Intel Xeon scalable processors delivered in Supermicro's servers bring a future-ready architecture for a Distributed Unit (DU) and a Central Unit (CU), deployed at the network's edge. The virtual Baseband Unit (vBBU) resources can be shared among multiple RRUs on-site in multi-carrier 1-sector, 3-sector, or 6-sector configurations to achieve optimal resource pooling for TCO savings.
Etisalat's strategic goal is to build and grow wireless networks to provide next-generation digital services to its customers in the region.
Hatem Bamatraf, Chief Technology Officer-International, Etisalat Group
Parallel Wireless together with Intel and Supermicro have become true strategic partners and key enablers in undertaking this Open RAN implementation.
Amrit Heer, Director of Sales, Parallel Wireless
While there is significant innovation happening, there are considerable gaps and challenges that make it difficult to deploy end-to-end Open RAN solutions, putting a heavy burden back on operators.
