Research Note

Abstract

January 22, 2021 RIC is off to a good start and quickly becoming exoteric with a strong rhetoric. The same week of January 10, 2021, AirHop Communications joined the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) to collaborate on 5G near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC)—an event I rightly anticipated, and Juniper Networks signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with Netsia, a subsidiary of Türk Telekom Group’s U.S.-based company Argela, to transfer its RIC technology to Juniper. I did not see this one coming and to be honest, while conducting our SD-RAN research in the fall last year, we did not know where exactly Netsia would fit in the rapid developing RIC ecosystem. Now we know, thanks to Juniper Networks! The deal includes related source code and patents plus exclusive rights to develop and sell products and solutions that integrate with RIC. It’s a win-win situation because Netsia gets a return on its long-term R&D effort and Juniper Networks solidly beefs up its service and domain level orchestration with the addition of a much-needed RAN domain, which puts RIC at the core to support new 5G capabilities and enable network slicing. NETSIA IS A HIGHLY REGARDED AND DECORATED 5G R&D CONTRIBUTOR Founded in 2004 in Turkey as a telecom network equipment vendor with an office in Sunnyvale, CA, Argela’s profile rose during the fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) era that started in 2006. At that time, Argela was a major femtocell and IMS player and was later acquired by Türk Telekom. Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Netsia was created in 2008 as a 100% subsidiary of Argela to conduct R&D in next-generation networks focusing on SDN, NFV, and cloud technologies. Since its inception, Netsia has been a major 5G R&D contributor and in 2016, gained worldwide recognition for its ProgRAN technology, an SDN-based and fully programmable C-RAN architecture that supports dynamic RAN slicing. LightCounting subscribers can access the full text of this research note by logging into their accounts.