Mavenir and Altiostar join forces to exploit the US OpenRAN opportunity

The US government keeps promising to chuck money at OpenRAN technology, so it makes sense for companies involved to raise their game.

Two of the companies most associated with OpenRAN are Mavenir and Altiostar. They operate in very similar parts of the market – cloud telecoms software – so under normal circumstances you might expect them to be competing with each other. But these are strange times and they seem to have decided a collaboration will be to their mutual benefit.

“We are collaborating with Altiostar to realize the full promise of OpenRAN,” said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO of Mavenir. “Our Radios will have O-RAN compliant interfaces and will interwork with other vendors’ solutions. I encourage other companies in the OpenRAN Policy Coalition to open their radios and ensure a broad supply of radios with open interfaces that are interoperable with third party equipment.”

“Altiostar has been at the forefront of the OpenRAN movement that is now being embraced by mobile operators around the world,” said Ashraf Dahod, CEO of Altiostar Networks. “Our collaboration with Mavenir on OpenRAN radios will ensure operators in the US have a truly open end-to-end infrastructure that will be cost effective and allows them to grow their business.”

To erase any doubt about the provenance of this move, the press release stresses the following: “As part of this effort, it is also planned to have these radios available to support the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act that was signed into law on March 12, 2020.” Companies such as these two and Parallel Wireless are likely to be richly rewarded by the US tax-payer for their help in developing an alternative RAN technology.