The O-RAN Alliance added operators Telus and US Cellular as members and detailed progress made in its bid to push deployment of the technology.

In a statement, the industry organisation said the latest additions brought its operator membership to 26, with more than 200 companies now contributing to “driving the definition and realisation of O-RAN technology”.

US Cellular’s addition comes less than a month after it also joined pressure group Open RAN Policy Coalition, which is focused on influencing government policies related to open and interoperable RAN technologies.

The O-RAN Alliance also unveiled a set of specifications to “bring new or updated features to all parts” of the architecture, which it said will allow vendors to progress implementations. The update follows the release of a white paper in February, which introduced an initial set of use cases and cloud native deployment support options.

O-RAN Alliance said 23 specifications have now been released.

Other updates
As part of its deployment push, the Alliance also provided an update on a virtual exhibition established in April following the cancellation of MWC Barcelona 2020.

It said this currently hosts 31 demos from 38 companies. Members including Ericsson, Nvidia and Parallel Wireless have also recently released 12 new virtual demonstrations of real O-RAN technology.

In May, O-RAN Alliance teamed with the GSMA to drive open RAN adoption in the 5G era, with the groups agreeing to work together to harmonise the open networking ecosystem and on an industry roadmap to ease entry for new players.