Japan-based vendors Fujitsu and NEC detailed plans to develop interoperability tests for 5G base stations conforming to O-RAN Alliance specifications, with both companies starting work on verification facilities at their respective laboratories this month.

The initiative is being implemented under Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO), with the goal of accelerating the global reach of base station equipment meeting O-RAN standards, the companies stated.

NEDO commissioned the companies to carry out R&D on assessment and verification technologies for interoperability between base station equipment. Fujitsu is running trials at a laboratory in the US and NEC at a UK-based site.

The companies stated the test environments offer the potential to “significantly streamline interoperability verification” between base station equipment from different vendors. The aim is to develop a conformance system which can perform standard tests meeting O-RAN specifications and implement an end-to-end test which can verify the connection from the core network to the terminal.

Fujitsu supplies evaluation tests for interconnection verification in multi-vendor environments and hardware quality corroboration tests to operators, including NTT and Rakuten Mobile.

In April, the vendor formed a strategic alliance with NTT to conduct research in the mobile communications and optical transport fields.

Meanwhile, NEC is working with NTT and NTT Docomo on a number of relevant initiatives, recently expanding an R&D partnership covering development of RAN intelligent controllers and forging an alliance in 2020 covering next-generation network technologies and architectures.