DZS announced its participation in the third Global O-RAN ALLIANCE Plugfest, and the first to be conducted in South Korea, in partnership with 5G mobile network innovator LG Uplus at its 5G Innovation Lab in Seoul. This testing validated multi-vendor 5G interoperability and end-to-end alignment to O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications for open Radio Access Network (RAN) elements, including fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul interfaces between Radio Access Network equipment provided by DZS, Altiostar (a Rakuten Symphony company), NEC Corporation, Intel and Keysight Technologies. Starting in Third Quarter 2021, the third O-RAN ALLIANCE Global Plugfest was held in 7 venues across the world including 94 participating companies – demonstrating the commercial readiness of many O-RAN implementations.

Vendor solutions in the LG Uplus multivendor interoperability test network included: DZS C1216RO open fronthaul gateways featuring built-in GPS and network timing support, and the high performance xHaul enabled DZS M3500 Cell Site Router (CSR). NEC 5G radio units (RUs). Altiostar/Rakuten Symphony virtualized distributed unit (O-DU) and central unit (O-CU) software.

Intel compute and network acceleration technology. Keysight Technologies test solutions, including a mix of real Test UE (NEMO PBM) devices and multi-UE emulators (UeSIM) as well as the CoreSIM Core emulator.