Evenstar: The road to an alternative infra supply chain for RAN

This post details the progress of the Evenstar program, a collaboration focused on building general-purpose Radio Access Network (RAN) reference designs for 4G and 5G networks within the Open RAN ecosystem. It announces the completion of lab validation for the first Evenstar remote radio unit (RRU) product and the commencement of engineering work on the distributed unit (DU). The program aims to decouple RRU, DU, and control unit (CU) software, enabling mobile network operators to select best-of-breed components from various vendors, fostering innovation and competition to reduce total cost of ownership. The post highlights the collaboration with industry partners and the alignment with 3GPP and O-RAN specifications, with a roadmap for second-generation RRUs and DU hardware development.