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-forwardstep 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),(6G), quantum communication and quantum internet, next generation space-basedspace 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, 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

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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 theUKTIN, UK telecoms innovation network to ensure that the specifications and intellectual property generated from allowing our partners goes to informlearn from standards development activities in fora and groups suchlike as 3GPP, ETSI and the O-RAN Alliance.Alliance, Essentiallyand helpingover ustime contribute to the design of these standards. Businesses and yourgovernment businesswill be able to monitor the development of the global market toand understandthe whetherframework furtherin stepswhich aretechnologies necessarywill todevelop, supportidentifying greateropportunities adherencefor andtaking further steps to support the adoption of industry-driven standards forin longer-termline sustainability.with UK priorities and the long-term sustainability of the UK sector.

Accelerating maturity

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International research and developmentOutreach

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 opportunityworkstream 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 5G Supply Chain Diversification Strategy.

See more information about UK/Republicthe UK & Republic of Korea Open RAN R&D collaboration.

Enabling

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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,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 equipmentequipment, and functional and secure interoperability testing,testing reducingto reduce barriers to the deployment of open-interface solutions. The UKUKTL Telecoms Lab will conduct security testing and research supporting DCMSthe UK governments security and diversification policy. The UKUKTL Telecoms Lab 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)(NPL) has signed thea contract to operate the UKUKTL Telecoms Lab through to March 2025. As a public body that is wholly owned by the Department for Business,Science, EnergyInnovation and IndustrialTechnology, Strategy, the NPL will provide the UKUKTL Telecoms Lab 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 UKlab’s Telecoms Lab’s benefits.

National

New Physicalmeasures Laboratory

to boost UK telecoms security - 28 December 2021