Open RAN vendor Juniper Networks deepened a collaboration with Turk Telekom through a project to employ RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) to deliver broadband services, its second deal in Turkey in as many weeks.

Along with Parallel Wireless, the companies are testing open RAN in Turk Telekom’s Innovation Centre ahead of deploying across trial sites. The trio are readying further evaluations having already completed an initial phase using the RIC for admission control over 4G.

Parallel Wireless software is being used in an open RAN set-up comprising multi-band radios, distributed units (DU) and centralised units (CU) for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G.

Juniper Networks provided its near-real- and non-real-time RICs while demonstrating the capabilities of various xApps and rApps to enable Turk Telekom to deploy differentiated services faster.

Turk Telekom and Juniper Networks previously collaborated on a network automation project employing an RIC.

Omdia principal analyst for Telco IT and Operations James Crawshaw expressed some disappointment Juniper Networks was working on a second RIC trial in Turkey rather than “another operator in another trial and with another RAN vendor”.

“To be fair, I think Juniper has trialled its RIC with tier-one European service providers and has integrated with several major DU/CU vendors aside from Parallel Wireless.”

“Still, I’d like to hear more about Juniper’s own rApps and xApps. I think it will be hard to make money from the RICs themselves and most of the value will be in the applications that run on them.”