📋 Tender Overview
The first phase of the SONIC Labs programme SONIC 1 created an independent telecoms laboratory delivered by Digital Catapult working with Ofcom. It aimed to address the lack of diversity in telecoms providers and a notable underrepresentation from UK vendors as a key provider of 5G access hardware and software on the global stage.This initiative delivered end-to-end testing with a number of telecom equipment vendors and their products in various ways to better understand the challenges and possibilities of Open Radio Access Network Open RAN. This project was run in over 3 separate sites with their central lab at Digital Catapult in London.Vendors engaged appreciated the end-to-end nature of the testing provided in the labs and the test and measurement TM equipment introduced in SONIC 1 and the SONIC Labs testing regime.The project identified a number of areas where additional capability would be helpful which will be addressed through the next phases of SONIC Labs.To ensure consistency in testing the devices vendors benefited from both testing products with other vendors bench-testing as well as full end-to-end integration testing in the lab as well as their respective external environments.Integration and deployment of an Open RAN system at both hardware and software-level proved to be more challenging than anticipated. Obstacles includedcarrying devices to a new environmentspecific hardware requirements despite using commercial off the shelf COTS hardware which delayed the set up of new Open RAN projectsadjustments during integration activities were time-consuming as the testbed was manually set up
