Open Networks Research and Development Fund

About the fund

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 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.

Running until March 2025, the Fund comprises a series of activities detailed in our Prospectus and in the links below. 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

UKTIN

A new UK telecoms innovation network will be the central docking point for industry to engage with us and the organisations who form part of the telecoms ecosystem, including industry verticals. It will guide businesses and researchers through the UK R&D ecosystem, including directions for relevant funding and investment opportunities, R&D facilities and testbeds, as well as providing high-level insight on how to engage with the opportunity, fund or facilities. The network stands ready to introduce key partners to the people and organisations who are working with us to help you get the most out of what the UK has to offer.

Coordinate and shape the technical standards

The UK’s continuous pipeline of innovations will further benefit from coordination and assistance in the development of technical standards. This will be supported by the UK telecoms innovation network to ensure that the specifications and intellectual property generated from our partners goes to inform standards development activities in fora and groups such as 3GPP, ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance. Essentially helping us and your business to monitor the development of the global market to understand whether further steps are necessary to support greater adherence and adoption of industry-driven standards for longer-term sustainability.

Accelerating maturity

FRANC

We are already supporting 15 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.

Future Open Networks (FON) Research Challenge.

The government is committed to working with key partners to ensure that openness and interoperability are sustained in future communications network architectures.

We will invest up to £25 million through the Future Open Networks Research Challenge to encourage the UK’s world-class academic researchers and industry to co-create future-facing telecoms technologies that are open and interoperable by default - making the UK an even more attractive place to invest. This will enable a rich R&D environment from which more patents will be filed by UK-based organisations to continue to support the growth of a stronger domestic telecoms market.

See more information about the international R&D competition

High demand density environments

The pioneering research and development of open-interface solutions will be coupled with a detailed understanding of the domestic market for Open RAN systems. We invite you to work with us to develop a balanced set of UK-specific Open RAN requirements for end-to-end deployments in high-demand density (HDD) environments. This will help us identify key market and technology gaps, focussing on components, services and appropriate suppliers, that we need to address to support the deployment of Open RAN in HDD environments.

The outcomes from this activity will underpin our future investments in supporting further solutions development and trials while at the same time providing smaller suppliers with direction for their product development to better target public network requirements in the UK.

Fundamentally, HDD sites represent the most challenging environments for the technical performance of RAN elements and systems. Through this programme of work we want to ensure that any new open-interface solutions developed are market-ready and tested to meet the needs of stakeholders responsible for building networks, especially mobile network operators and neutral host providers.

International research and development

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 this opportunity 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 to be announced 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 Diversification Strategy.

See more information about the international R&D competition

Enabling businesses to integrate the open network components and systems

While an open-interface architecture will unlock the supplier lock-in across today’s market, the industry will need to manage the introduction of additional ‘touch points’ across the network from a security and resilience perspective and new challenges in system integration.

We plan to announce further investment to enable industry to integrate open-interface solutions from different suppliers to work together beyond the laboratory environment, both technically and commercially, to be deployed within public networks. This will give us an early indication on the viability of deploying and maintaining the operations of open interface architectures against the security and performance requirements for public telecoms providers’ networks and services.

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.

UKTL

We are 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, reducing barriers to the deployment of open-interface solutions. We encourage businesses and researchers to use the UKTL to evaluate the security of telecoms equipment before deployment, and to take advantage of their guidance on mitigation measures where security falls short.

Driving adoption

A neutral-host solution for deploying Open RAN technology

Early progress in this space is demonstrated by our commitment to work with NEC - one of the leading suppliers of Open RAN equipment - 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.

New challenges in systems integration

While an open interface architecture will unlock the supplier lock-in across today’s market, the industry will need to manage the introduction of additional ‘touch points’ across the network from a security and resilience perspective and new challenges in system integration.

We will further invest up to £21 million to enable industry to integrate open-interface solutions from different suppliers to work together beyond the laboratory environment, both technically and commercially, to be deployed within public networks. This will give us an early indication on the viability of deploying and maintaining the operations of open interface architectures against the security and performance requirements for public telecoms providers’ networks and services.

Open RAN trials in high demand dense environments

Alongside NeutrORAN and other industry-led commercial trials and deployments for Open RAN, we will be offering up to £22 million to collaboratively trial open-interface solutions in high demand density environments across the UK. These real-world trials will look to utilise the test cases derived from the initial HDD requirements gathering exercise as set out by network operators and other network builders. This will provide a crucial assessment of market readiness of the open-interface solutions and help analyse the capacity of the systems integration ecosystem in the UK. These technological developments and trials represent an opportunity for the UK to grow presence and influence within the global supply chain itself.

Current projects

• SONIC
• NeutroRAN
• FRANC
• UKTIN