Open Networks Research and Development Fund
The Open Networks Research and Development (R&D) Fund is the £250 million government supported programme to deliver upon the UK’s 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy.
About the fund
Apply now for the Open Networks Ecosystem competition.
Register your interest to attend the competition briefing event on Monday 27 March 2023.
The competition closes at 23:59 on Tuesday 23 May 2023.
The UK government is committed to building secure and resilient communications infrastructure as well as enhancing competition and innovation within the telecoms supply chain. Our ambitious plans are supported by a £250 million Open Networks R&D Fund to accelerate the development and deployment of open interface architectures, such as Open RAN.
We are already seeing the momentum in the global market to ensure that open-interface solutions are near commercial grade for wide-scale deployments. Mobile network operators, builders and suppliers are taking proactive steps to support Open RAN trials and committing to deployments in their commercial networks.
The government’s £250 million investment will accelerate the pace in support of these initiatives - enabling the development of open-interface solutions and stepping up our efforts to shape technology standards alongside key industry and international partners.
The government’s investment represents a step forward in our endeavour for the UK to take a leading role in early stage research and guide the development of technology standards, alongside key industry and international partners.
This work will help support government and UK mobile network operators’ joint ambition for 35% of the UK’s mobile network traffic to be carried over open and interoperable RAN architectures by 2030.
We want the entire country to benefit from the social and economic advantages that digital infrastructure enables. We know that the future telecoms landscape will be broad and varied, encompassing a range of emerging technologies including 6th generation wireless (6G), quantum communication and quantum internet, next generation space based communications, cloud communications and associated infrastructure, edge computing, and hardware advances such as next generation fibre optics. We want the UK to be at the forefront of these emerging trends.
It is with this in mind that we have designed the investment and planned activities to work towards safeguarding the security, resilience, competition and innovation benefits of diverse telecoms supply chains, without compromising on the performance, features or efficiency.
Central to the Open Networks R&D Fund is our ambition to:
- accelerate open-interface products and solutions - ensuring they are truly interoperable, performant, and sustainable – to support our long-term vision for a more open and innovative telecoms market.
- incentivise and derisk accelerated deployment in the UK - to encourage and accelerate network operators to adopt and deploy open network solutions.
- develop an internationally recognised UK telecoms ecosystem - positioning the UK as a leading global market and focal point for research into open network technology.
Running until March 2025, each focuses on different aspects of the technology that underpin open networking and will help the telecoms sector make the transition quickly and securely. It will support the development of the ecosystem, allowing for room to manoeuvre and continue to seek new options to support businesses and researchers as the market develops.
Evolving the innovation ecosystem
UK Telecoms Innovation Network (UKTIN)
UKTIN is the innovation network for the UK telecoms sector, bringing together industry, academia, and government to catalyse telecoms R&D investment, cooperation, and commercialisation.
Formed in 2022, UKTIN’s mission is to transform the UK telecoms innovation ecosystem, capitalising on the country’s strengths in technology, academia, and entrepreneurialism, while positioning it for growth as new opportunities emerge in the industry. UKTIN provides an impartial, inclusive, and collaborative forum for the UK telecoms innovation system, convening a range of bodies and organisations across industry, government and academia into one network where they can interact in a neutral environment and on a level playing field. Here, they are able to forge new connections, discover ideas and concepts with innovation potential from throughout the country, understand where innovation is needed in the industry, the skills needed to capitalise on new opportunities, and match resources (such as investment and talent) to organisations and projects.
Read more about the work of UKTIN and join the network to keep updated on the latest developments here.
Coordinate and shape the technical standards
The UK’s continuous pipeline of innovations will further benefit from coordination and assistance in engaging with the development of technical standards. This will be supported by UKTIN, allowing our partners to learn from standards development activities in fora and groups like 3GPP, ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance, and over time contribute to the design of these standards. Businesses and government will be able to monitor the development of the global market and the framework in which technologies will develop, identifying opportunities for taking further steps to support the adoption of industry-driven standards in line with UK priorities and the long-term sustainability of the UK sector.
Accelerating maturity
FRANC
We are already supporting 14 projects through the Future RAN Competition (FRANC) to help accelerate the development of subcomponents and market models for open interface architectures. Our commitment of £36 million enables a wide range of organisations to focus on developing technical solutions such as radio transmitters, signal processing equipment, power management systems and software to support open interface architectures. The projects are spread across the UK, including in Glasgow, Cardiff, Cambridge, Newcastle, Newport, Slough and Ebbw Vale - building on the existing industrial strength of these regions, while further developing an engineering base with a new set of skills. Read more about these projects here.
Future Open Networks (FON) Research Challenge.
The FONRC challenge was launched to encourage universities to work with large telecom organisations of all sizes to conduct research and development to design telecoms networks of the future, ensuring they are always open to competition and new players.
The three winning consortia are being led by the prestigious UK universities: University of York, University of Bristol and University of Surrey.
They will enable the creation and development of more UK-based capability to help diversify the UK telecoms industry. It will also enable future technologies, such as 6G, to develop faster and more efficiently.
See more information about the Future Open Networks Research Challenge.
International Outreach
Developing UK-specific requirements will give new and emerging market entrant suppliers greater clarity over the products they must develop to compete in the UK, as defined by their customers, and this greater transparency should make the UK a more appealing market. We will maximise the reach of this workstream through international partnerships and collaborative R&D to develop global markets for export and provide an avenue for like-minded partners to contribute to the diversification of the UK’s telecoms supply chain.
The first of these partnerships to be launched is with the Republic of Korea to accelerate the development of power-efficient products and solutions for open interface architectures. We plan to announce additional global partnerships during the course of the fund. We look forward to engaging with international governments and industry across the world as we develop and implement the measures set out in the 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy.
See more information about the UK & Republic of Korea Open RAN R&D collaboration.
We have also been working to build consensus on a set of Open RAN Principles to ensure a universal approach to the development and implementation of open-interface solutions.
The Open RAN Principles:
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Open disaggregation, allowing elements of the RAN to be sourced from different suppliers and implemented in new ways.
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Standards-based compliance, allowing all suppliers to test solutions against standards in an open, neutral environment.
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Demonstrated interoperability, ensuring disaggregated elements work together as a fully functional system — at a minimum matching the performance and security of current solutions.
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Implementation neutrality, allowing suppliers to innovate and differentiate on the features and performance of their products.
These principles have already been endorsed by Australia, Canada and the United States.
Developing facilities and demonstration capabilities
SONIC
The SmartRAN Open Networks Interoperability Centre (SONIC Labs) is designed to help commercialise open-interface solutions and test their performance. We have committed £16 million to establish SONIC Labs as a commercially-neutral, collaborative environment for open, disaggregated and software-centric network solutions and multi-vendor architectures. It is maintained and operated by Digital Catapult and Ofcom to provide testing services for suppliers and empowers the wider community to demonstrate their equipment to the standards demanded by the network operators. We are designing and building this facility for long-term capability with the intention to make a lasting impact.
UK Telecoms Lab
The government is establishing the UK Telecoms Lab (UKTL) to support and inform UK security and supply chain diversification ambitions. The UKTL will enable both security evaluations of equipment, and functional and secure interoperability testing to reduce barriers to the deployment of open-interface solutions. The UKTL will conduct security testing and research supporting the UK governments security and diversification policy. The UKTL will engage with industry to ensure that its activities remain relevant as networks and the technology that underpins them evolve.
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has signed a contract to operate the UKTL through to March 2025. As a public body that is wholly owned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the NPL will provide the UKTL with vital independence from industry and its status as an experienced operator of government laboratories will greatly accelerate the establishment of an effective operation and realisation of the lab’s benefits.
Driving adoption
A neutral-host solution for deploying Open RAN technology
An example of early progress in driving adoption of Open RAN technology is demonstrated by our work with NEC, through the NeutrORAN project. NEC is one of the leading suppliers of Open RAN equipment. The project is looking to implement and demonstrate the performance of a ‘neutral host’ Open RAN solution in outdoor rural environments. This project builds on NEC’s recent strategic investments to establish both a Global Open RAN Centre of Excellence and 5G Radio R&D Centre in the UK.
The NeutrORAN project has established a testbed for a multi-operator, neutral host solution in Wales including in Cefn Du and Menai Science Park (M-Sparc). This ‘neutral host’ solution is showcasing a more cost efficient way to deliver capacity and coverage to underserved regions with the potential for the architecture and deployment model to be scalable beyond the UK.
Next steps
The Government has launched the Open Networks Ecosystem competition offering up to £80m of funding in the next phase of the UK Open Networks Research and Development (R&D) Fund.
The competition aims to tackle key barriers to the adoption of open mobile networks:
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High Demand Density (HDD) Use Cases/Demonstrations
HDD sites like city centres or train stations represent the most challenging environments for the technical performance of mobile networks. We want to develop, demonstrate and test approaches for optimising mobile network performance in High Demand Density environments.
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Processors, radio frequency and other RAN Hardware
We are looking at projects which address issues around radio frequency components, from hardware to chipsets to radio tech, we want to ensure that the building blocks for the telecoms ecosystem are secure and diverse.
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RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and other RAN Software Automation
We want to find project which will investigate the RIC, X app and R app software components in order to make them more efficient, less energy consuming, quicker and secure.
The competition is currently open for applications, read more about the competition and how to get involved here.
Latest news
UK to accelerate research on 5G and 6G technology as part of £110 million telecoms R&D package - 13 December 2022
Government announces cutting-edge new telecoms lab for Solihull - 14 October 2022
New government plans to fire up innovation in 5G and 6G as UK and South Korea launch telecoms technology partnership - 26 July 2022
New measures to boost UK telecoms security - 28 December 2021
Get involved
To learn more about upcoming opportunities, please register your interest for diversification R&D opportunities.
Current projects
Publications
Last updated 5 January 2023 + show all updates
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Updated sections on UK Telecoms Lab and National Physical Laboratory.
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Added prospectus document.
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First published.