BT is already an active participant on four of the DCMS FRANC projects:

• Proteus
• 5G-DU-Volution
• Scalable Optical Fronthaul for 5G Open RAN
• Accelerating RAN Intelligence in 5G (ARI-5G)

As well as being a major mobile network service provider in the UK, BT brings the benefit of access to its facilities at Adastral Park and in particular the TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centre there.  

As early as 2017, BT partnered with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Facebook (now Meta) to open the UK’s TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centre (TEAC), a UK lab bringing together start-ups and BT to develop new telecoms technologies.  TEAC UK recruited its third wave of startups in January 2020, sponsored by BT and working with BT Innovation Martlesham & BT Research in the areas of Edge Compute, 5G, AR/VR.

TEAC UK gives these start-ups access to BT's test networks and to BT engineers in Adastral Park. Start-ups also get 12 month membership of Innovation Martlesham and further collaborative and networking opportunities within the TIP and TEAC community.

BT and their TEAC partners have already conducted collaborative research projects to test open RAN technologies in Adastral Park, investigating both non-real-time and near-real-time RAN intelligent controller (Non-RT-RIC and Near-RT-RIC) functions including SON (Self Organizing Network) technology, energy efficiency, interference mitigation and massive MIMO. By BT feeding such findings into TIP, it helps accelerate vendor interoperability and maturity of the open RAN ecosystem.

Additionally, at Adastral Park, there is the BT TIP Community Lab. This is where BT carry out testing with TIP members to test a range of telecoms equipment, including Open RAN equipment. The community lab is both an indoor and outdoor test environment.

You can read more about the TIP community labs here.