Parallel Wireless to Deliver on Etisalat’s OpenRAN Vision across Middle East, Asia and Africa

Parallel Wireless, Inc., the leading U.S.-based OpenRAN company delivering the world’s only software-defined end-to-end 2G, 3G, 4G & 5G OpenRAN solution for coverage and capacity, today announced that Etisalat, one of the world’s leading telecom groups in emerging markets with over 148 million subscribers, is set to trial Parallel Wireless 2G, 3G, 4G & 5G OpenRAN across its markets in Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Today’s announcement is aligned with Etisalat Group objectives of achieving digital transformation with the deployment of best-in-class technologies to support 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G connectivity.

Parallel Wireless enables a shift to open, software-based, and virtualized OpenRAN network architectures to overcome deployment and cost challenges, while also delivering network agility and much lower deployment and maintenance cost.

The cloud-native and software-based Parallel Wireless OpenRAN approach across ‘ALL G’ significantly improves network economics by converging ‘ALL G’, including 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, on to one unified software platform that is easy to manage.

This eliminates the need to maintain siloed legacy networks dedicated to just one G service resulting in the OPEX cost reduction to maintain networks. This approach will allow Etisalat Group to modernise legacy networks for cost reduction and reduces the complexity and integration expense of rolling out multi-vendor 5G systems.

Amrit Heer, Sales Director, MENA, Parallel Wireless, said, “As one of the leading communication providers in the emerging markets, Etisalat understands the true potential of greater leverage to their business, in both high end and low-end markets with a greater buying power by shaping the telecom ecosystem and embracing new network architectures, such as OpenRAN. We are proud to have partnered with Etisalat for these engagements to deliver coverage and capacity without making extensive capital investments associated with legacy network deployments. We are proud to have been selected to support Etisalat in reimagining wireless infrastructure to be much lower cost ensuring access to innovative digital services in the region.”

The Parallel Wireless OpenRAN has shown cost benefits while for the first time simultaneously delivering all 3 RAN technologies (2G, 3G, 4G/LTE) with decoupling the programmable RAN software from the hardware and allowing it to run on general-purpose processing platforms, the multi-technology software-defined GPP-based OpenRAN base stations will allow Etisalat to deploy ALL G systems with fully virtualized 2G, 3G 4G technology that is software upgradable to 5G. Etisalat can run simultaneously 2G, 3G and 4G on the same base station to provide commercial data and voice services to Etisalat’s customers, in urban and rural scenarios. Multi-technology RRUs are software-defined and can utilize any 3GPP-compliant RAN split to connect to any COTS vBBU enabling vendor interoperability and supplier cost reduction even further.