Mavenir and Terrestar team up for satellite Open RAN integration

The project, announced just ahead of MWC, is supposed to integrate satellite connectivity with Open RAN terrestrial networks which the firms say will provide ‘seamless connectivity’ for users across satellite and terrestrial networks.

Terrestar will launch a new Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) service offer, evolving to a full 5G Direct to Device (D2D) service by 2025. Mavenir will provide the enabling 3GPP standards-compliant Core and O-RAN interface technology.

“This partnership aims to develop interoperable standards that seamlessly link multi-orbit satellite systems, ground infrastructure, and mobile devices together,” said Jacques Leduc, President and CEO of Terrestar Solutions. “This initiative is a pivotal step towards ensuring every Canadian enjoys seamless, high-quality connectivity, directly benefiting both industries and consumers."

Pardeep Kohli, CEO at Mavenir added: “Mavenir's O-RAN, built on ETSI O-RAN 3GPP R.17 standards, makes it possible to integrate terrestrial and satellite service points quickly and seamlessly. Working with our partner Terrestar, this project showcases the remarkable flexibility that can be achieved through this standard and technology. Open RAN deployments are demonstrating their clear potential for enabling unprecedented levels of connectivity for consumers and industries, surpassing the possibilities of traditional RAN software builds.”

Alongside this, Mavenir will be using MWC to announce a new Open vRAN solution powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel vRAN Boost – which is supposed to deliver ‘a cloud-native, high-performance and energy-efficient solution for latency-sensitive and compute-intensive mobile network applications.’ 

Open RAN and satellites are certainly some of the biggest talking points in telecoms, but most networks remain terrestrial and based on kit from one of the kit vendors Nokia, Ericsson or Huawei. We’re still working out how big a part both technologies will end up playing in the wider market, but no doubt they’ll plenty of comms regarding both flowing from the halls of MWC this week.