Etisalat, following a joint announcement with Rakuten Communications Platform to develop a reference design for cloud-native, Open RAN networks, is furthering its commitment to disaggregation of the radio access network through a production trial with Open RAN specialist Parallel Wireless.
Etisalat is based in Abu Dhabi and provides telecom services to some 154 million subscribers in 16 countries across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The work with Parallel Wireless is focused on Etisalat’s operation in Afghanistan which is going through a strong uptick in mobile broadband penetration–from 1% in 2013 to 22% in 2019, according to figures provided by Parallel Wireless.
