Parallel Wireless fights for Open RAN leadership with Peruvian win

Parallel Wireless is arguably carving out a leadership position in the increasingly popular Open RAN movement as it bags another contract in Peru.

The likes of Mavenir, NEC, Altiostar and Cisco are all vying for attention as the new infrastructure trend gathers steam, but it is Parallel Wireless who’s name keeps popping up all over the world. This week, the vendor has announced an agreement with Internet para Todos Perú (IpT Peru), a new telco owned by Telefonica, Facebook, IDB Invest and CAF.

“We have selected Parallel Wireless Open RAN to help us reduce our network deployment costs through disaggregation of hardware and software, RAN and core virtualization and network automation with real-time SON for deployments across Latin America and 5G readiness,” said Renan Ruiz, CTO of IpT.

“We are proud to have been selected for these deployments in Latin America to deliver quality wireless services to the end users and businesses through better communication and collaboration between ‘development’ and ‘operations’ groups by enabling the CI/CD based operating model,” said Steve Papa, CEO of Parallel Wireless. “The end goal is to help global MNOs build and release software at high velocity. without making extensive capital investments or incur ongoing maintenance cost associated with legacy network deployments.”

The new telco, IpT, is an effort by the four players to seek revenues in a market which has been notoriously difficult to find success. South America is another region where the digital divide is very evident, though with new technologies gaining maturity, connectivity is becoming more of a commercial reality.

While it may seem unusual to see Facebook associated with these projects, the social media giant has been the driving force behind the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an organisation where the mission is to deliver the internet to all. Part of this mission is Open RAN, to decouple hardware from software in the network, helping to reduce deployment costs and improve maintenance.

When you tie all of these elements together, it means internet for more people. And internet for more people means more advertising opportunities for Facebook and its customers. As you can only serve so many ads to a single user without destroying the experience, Facebook has to introduce more services and attract more users to continue growth. It is attempting to do both, and Open RAN is proving to be an important component to ‘connect the next billion users’.

Irrelevant as to whether the ambitions of these projects are philanthropic or commercial, the end result is more people accessing the digital economy, which shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing. Open RAN is increasingly becoming a mature technology, and while it might not be ready for the more developed markets where telcos still rely on the resilience of the tried and tested traditional RAN, there is traction in the developing markets.

Looking around the world, Parallel Wireless does seem to be one of the more popular vendors in these embryonic test beds.

With Vodafone, Parallel Wireless has been drafted in to help run trials in the UK business and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It is also one of the partners drafted in to help MTN deploy OpenRAN over 5,000 sites in 21 markets and was also recently named as the main partner for Etisalat to trial the technology across its markets in Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Mavenir, Cisco and NEC might be making a significant amount of noise in the press for OpenRAN, though Parallel Wireless seems to be making more waves with deals and active trials. It is always worth noting that not all deals and trials will be proclaimed from the treetops, on the evidence which is available to use Parallel Wireless has arguably taken an early leadership position.