NTT and Fujitsu formed a strategic business alliance to conduct research in the mobile communications and optical transport fields, with the aim of expanding into the global market and delivering sustainable infrastructure.

In a joint statement, the companies explained R&D efforts would focus on developing various energy efficient technologies involving disaggreated high-performance computing, open architecture optical transport and mobile communications.

They “envision a new, energy-efficient digital society” founded on global and open collaboration with a wide range of partners.

To prepare for a post-5G era, they “will study the development and promotion of open interface-based technologies, as well as global businesses based on the results of these activities”.

They aim to will work on measures to improve performance, which remains a challenge for expanding” virtualised RAN (vRAN) adoption and “develop control technologies to optimise RANs”.

“Technologies developed through the collaboration will be used by operators globally through the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem initiative“, they stated.

NTT and Fujitsu plan to promote “open joint research with various global partners” to deliver “a sustainable digital society” which will contribute to NTT’s Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) initiative, a concept for “networks and information processing infrastructure”.

Fujitsu established an IOWN/6G Platform Development Office last month.

As part of the alliance, NTT Electronics will acquire a 66.6 per cent stake in Fujitsu Advanced Technologies, a provider of semiconductor mounting technology, which will be renamed NTT Electronics Cross Technologies and start operations on 1 June.

In June 2020, NTT forged an alliance with NEC to jointly research and develop next-generation network technologies and promote open RAN architecture and push IOWN.