Arm has its sights set on taking over the 5G infrastructure market, announcing today its entrance into the O-RAN alliance.

The move, according to Panch Chandrasekaran, marketing director of infrastructure at Arm, will accelerate the company’s focus on providing telecommunication providers and vendors the 5G infrastructure on which to build open, interoperable, and cloud-native networks.

While Arm is perhaps best known for the processors that power most consumer electronics today, the company has for the past several years been pushing deeper into the infrastructure market, powering things like IoT devices and cellular base stations.

“The thing a lot of people don't realize is [Arm’s] broad presences in the cellular infrastructure market,” said Chandrasekaran, adding that Arm-based processors command roughly 28% of the infrastructure market today and are increasingly being deployed in cellular base stations.

According to Chandrasekaran, the traditional way networks have been built is using proprietary hardware delivered by a handful of vendors, like Nokia, Ericsson, or Huawei.

“If you’re an operator, you can say: Mr. Ericsson, Mr. Huawei can you deploy a solution for me and they would come in, bring in a fully baked, end-to-end system, deploy that for you, and even maintain the service for you," Chandrasekaran said. “In the open platform approach, things become a lot more equal.”

Chandrasekaran explained that there has been a concerted push among many network operators to move away from black-box hardware and instead adopt open, white-box platforms like those championed by Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and, of course, the O-RAN Alliance.

“The momentum is building,” he said.

That said, for the moment the overwhelming majority of deployments are still using hardware from the key OEMs, Chandrasekaran admitted.

However, the tides appear to turning as the network operators grapple with the challenges of rolling out 5G networks capable of supporting the exponential increase in traffic and bandwidth driven by new and changing use cases. These include massive machine-type communications, enhanced mobile broadband, and ultra-reliable, low-latency communications.

Telecommunication operators like Telefonica and Vodafone have already made headway in this endeavor with widespread deployments of open radio access network (RAN) technologies across much of Europe and Africa. As more operators begin to adopt open source hardware, Chandrasekaran said Arm and its partners are well positioned to provide chips with the necessary power and efficiency required to realize 5G’s full potential.

And Arm’s Neoverse chip architecture is its weapon of choice in this endeavor.

“As 5G evolves and expands, our infrastructure business is developing, and in many instances inventing, the technologies needed for a 5G world that includes a trillion edge devices,” the company said.

“At the end of the day, we see 5G as a key market segment for Arm,” Chandrasekaran said.

Arm kicked off 2020 with a flurry of announcements including the launch of Marvell’s latest generation Octeon infrastructure chips, and Ampere’s Altra data center and edge processors.

The Octeon TX2, launched in early March, made waves when Nokia and Samsung announced the chips would power their next generation of base station hardware.

Ampere latest data-center class chip, the Altra, is designed specifically for use in cloud, hyperscale, and edge environments. Oracle and Enea have already tapped the chip to power their public cloud platform and edge universal CPE platforms, respectively.