The UK's BT, fabless semiconductor company Cavium and the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) have used Mobile World Congress to announce plans to conduct one of the first field trials of OpenCellular LTE (OC-LTE) base stations.
The TIP's OpenCellular project is an open source mobile ecosystem designed to help connect the unconnected by introducing LTE connectivity to sparsely populated areas. OC-LTE is a carrier-grade outdoor eNodeB base station. Project leader Facebook has open sourced the OC-LTE design files including the schematic, layout and software.
Cavium announced during Mobile World Congress 2018 that the first OC-LTE design is now ready for field trials, with the UK's BT planning to . The prototype OC-LTE base station runs a commercial LTE stack contributed by Cavium to the TIP.
Cavium has also integrated with the Nokia community hosted OC-LTE network to allow the allows the OC-LTE base station to support cloud-based remote auto-connection, configuration and monitoring.
“Integrating the OC-LTE base station with the Nokia community-hosted network will provide a complete deployment solution for BT and other network operators,” commented Jean-Francois Lacasse, Cavium wireless integration manager and OC-LTE Radio Access Working Group lead.
“The deployment-ready LTE stack provided by Cavium includes APIs that enable the integration of management capabilities which are critical to deploying OC-LTE base stations.”