With over 500 engineers at its development centre in Bengaluru, Altiostar is planning to triple its headcount in India over the next year
Following its acquisition by Japanese electronics commerce and online retailing giant Rakuten Group, US-based open virtual radio access network technology provider Altiostar Networks is expanding its footprint in India. The Group acquired Altiostar for over $1 billion.
With over 500 engineers at its development centre in Bengaluru, Altiostar is planning to triple its headcount in India over the next year, said Srinivas Gudladana, head of India operations at Altiostar Networks.
Gudladana said the company will increasingly focus on two strategic priorities — 5G protocols and virtualised services for the mobile industry. So far, India was the only development centre for the US-based network infrastructure major, but it now plans to hire aggressively in the UK.
Gudladana added that the company built RAN (radio access network) ground-up from Bengaluru.
“The traditional architecture from the big telecom vendors had these components integrated and were deployed with custom hardware. Between 2012-2017, Altiostar did the first step of RAN disaggregation, by having CU on COTS (common off the shelf) hardware and virtualising CU. We revolutionised products on off-the-shelf hardware and created open interfaces. Virtualised DU and CU have been deployed across Japan, and now are going to other countries including India,” said Gudladana.
With the government’s proposal to introduce 5G in India, O-RAN network equipment has become somewhat of a buzzword in India.
In June, Reliance Industries Ltd’s Jio Platforms announced that it is partnering with Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors under which it will be using NXP Semiconductors’ Layerscape family of multicore processors to implement a 5G NR O-RAN small cell solution.
In a similar move, Vodafone announced in May that it is collaborating with Qualcomm Technologies Inc. to develop the technical blueprint for telecom equipment suppliers to use Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) technology to help build 5G networks.
