SONIC is a unique program of activity aimed at accelerating open-based innovation to diversify the UK telecom supply chain. How’s it doing? in March 2021, we covered the launch of SONIC, the UK’s government-backed initiative to grease the wheels of the Open RAN supply chain. Today, SONIC provided an update on its progress. To recap (and that’s important, because judging by the questions on the live chat, expectations of SONIC are already running far beyond its well-articulated remit – more on that later): Establish a facility that accelerates learning about the practical challenges of re-aggregating a disaggregated RAN. Help pre-commercial products/vendors gain early sight of downstream challenges in integration and end-to-end (and live) operation – thereby mitigating later integration risk. Feed the learnings back into the industry to help standards refinement. Repeat the process using alternate vendors. The June 2021 update shared the news that item 1 is pretty much complete: in just three months, SONIC has built seven sites around the UK, constituting three representative – but fully operational – RANs developed integrated based on the available open standards. It’s a sophisticated setup. The three radio access networks (“chains”) can use one of four separate core 5G networks (though […]