Orange Group has made further progress with its experimental network called Pikeo, extending its deployment to Spain and demonstrating the benefits of combining open RAN with a 5G standalone (SA) network, such as being able to deploy a 5G RAN and core network in under one hour.
First established in 2021, Pikeo is Orange’s cloud-based and fully automated 5G SA experimental network. Although Orange Spain already has a commercial 5G SA network, Pikeo allows it to test all manner of things such as cloud native, disaggregated networks, APIs and more.
Pikeo has now been deployed in two sites in France (Lannion and Chatillon) and two in Madrid in Spain. In the Spanish capital, Orange recently achieved a new milestone by combining open RAN with 5G SA in collaboration with technology partners such as HPE, Casa Systems, Mavenir and Dell Technologies.
Alexis Salas, director of engineering at Orange Spain, said the pilot has “allowed us to test in a real environment our vision of the future of telecommunications networks focused on the use of software and data as fundamental pillars. Specifically, we have implemented a 5G SA network based on open-source software running in our private Orange Cloud environment.”
Orange listed other benefits of combining open RAN with 5G SA as the “dynamic management of end-to-end virtual networks, prioritizing traffic and following security principles, especially key to provide critical communication services, such as law enforcement communications.”
It also cited the optimization of energy consumption, “adjusting resources to the minimum necessary, to promote sustainability and energy efficiency.”
Big bet
Orange describes Pikeo as both an experiment and a “big bet” for the group, as it explores how best to operate and deploy a cloud-native, automated and multi-vendor 5G SA network.
A spokesperson for the operator said Pikeo demonstrates that the automation of the deployment and the life cycle management of containerized network functions (CNFs), and the automation of some operation activities, have a real value for its different markets.
“It also demonstrated that we need new skills; this is all about skills transformation,” the spokesperson added.
The spokesperson noted that 5G SA and O-RAN were CNFs and said containers and Kubernetes “represent the natural evolution of virtualization techniques and requires a redesign of the network functions using for instance, micro-services.” Orange also deployed the CNFs automatically using a Gitops approach.
According to the operator, “this proved that we can duplicate a 5G SA deployment in any country with small adaptations.”
As for next steps, Orange and its enterprise unit Orange Business will continue to work with some of their customers to deploy mobile private networks, “in continuation of what was presented during MWC 2023.”
The operator also flagged ongoing work on group-wide network integration factories that were first established in 2022 and aim to reduce the delivery time of new services.