According to foreign media reports, with the financial support of the German government, Deutsche Telekom is taking the lead in establishing a new open ran laboratory with other partners. The German Ministry of transport and digital infrastructure (bmvi) will invest 17 million euros (about US $19.7 million) in the next three years, which is roughly the same as the total investment amount of 11 partners of the project. The government hopes to help develop and accelerate the ecosystem of decoupling network solution providers in Germany and Europe. "All interested market participants can enter, cooperate and learn from each other - whether network operators, network suppliers, or new participants such as start-ups or small and medium-sized enterprises. In the open lab environment, they can research, test, verify and develop new innovative products and business models." Andreas Scheuer, German Federal Minister of transport and digital infrastructure, said. "In this way, we are strengthening Germany's position as an industrial and technological center and adapting our communication technology to the future." Other participating members of the laboratory include Telefonica, Vodafone, Nokia, BISDN, Capgemini engineering, eantc, Fraunhofer HHI, highstreet technologies, rod and Schwartz and Tu Berlin. The laboratory is named i14y, which is an abbreviation for interoperability and one of the main objectives of the program. In addition to end-to-end integration and testing performance, this open laboratory ultimately wants to confirm that components are ready for deployment on the market. Partners like Fraunhofer HHI and Tu Berlin will contribute beyond testing, and they will conduct engineering research on increasingly complex multi vendor systems. It is reported that the laboratory is located in DT Innovation Park in Berlin and has been started and operated. Orange and the above three operators and other European operators have previously expressed their commitment to open ran by signing a memorandum of understanding. Part of this involves making it easier for ecosystems and technologies themselves of different participants to develop and mature. In this case, the laboratory can be used to test and integrate components of open and decoupled networks for wider use. It follows the concept of lab-as-a-service, so resources can be used as APIs, and satellite site laboratories operated by Spain Telecom and Nokia will also be connected. The Berlin laboratory is considered to be the central site, with satellite sites in Dusseldorf and Munich. The laboratory also plans to work closely with key standard development teams and projects that provide support, including the o-ran alliance, tip, the open computing project (OCP), the open network foundation (onf) and the open network automation platform (ONAP). Deutsche Telekom hopes that the project results can be directly transformed into the network development of Deutsche Telekom group. (Xinhua News Agency)