About “RAN Tips”

Aug 18, 2022

What is “RAN Tips” all about? Why do we need it? Can we eat it?

status of this document: MOSTLY DONE

Every Saga has a Beginning #

RAN Tips aims to explain Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) concepts in a way that everyone can understand without losing their mind. After all, it is tough to find your way around by searching through the official documentation, trying to untangle the acronym soup, and cryptic diagrams to remotely make sense of things.

When learning O-RAN, the canonical reference document is considered the O-RAN Specification. However, as in any formal specification, they are exhaustive, hard to wrap your head around, and not-at-all beginner-friendly.

Moreover, it’s challenging to make sense of things without reading dozens of these specs. There’s way too much information to get started. Especially if you come from outside the 5G/Telco/RAN domain, the acronyms and overall terminology can confuse you.

On top of that, since O-RAN is pretty new (as of 2022), the specifications change almost every few months. So, it’s hard to keep track of things without really being at the epicenter of all these.

Guess what? I am in that epicenter at the moment. I work hands-on on various aspects of Open Radio Access Networks at VMware Telco. So, as a part of my job, I keep track of everything Open RAN.

This website aspires to be quite the opposite. We assume you know nothing about Open Radio Access Networks, yet you want to learn about it and don’t have time to dig into all those specs.