Cisco’s Private 5G platform was part of a 5G open radio access network (RAN) deployment in Japan that supports the sharing of localized 5G infrastructure. The work also tapped into the long-used distributed antenna system (DAS) architecture.

The deployment uses the Cisco platform tied to JTower’s in-building infrastructure, Airspan’s 5G virtualized RAN (vRAN) software and hardware platform, and Mitsui Knowledge Industry’s deployment and testing resources. It also uses optical relay DAS that converts radio waves from base stations into digital signals and distributes those signals through optical cables.

DAS systems have been around for more than 20 years. They are traditionally used to provide a more robust and localized cellular network in densely populated areas like stadiums and conference centers. They can also support multiple vendors running their networks on shared infrastructure.

The firms said the integrated deployment in Japan resulted in lower power consumption compared with separate standalone deployments without impacting performance. The work targets expected challenges of enterprises or municipalities having to juggle equipment infrastructure to power localized networks like private 5G networks.

“This collaboration is a significant step forward for the industry as it showcases the interoperability between technology providers using open RAN base stations to deploy local 5G,” the firms noted in a statement. “Together, the companies’ technology solutions will enable a new, innovative infrastructure sharing approach to help enterprises and local government entities to optimize costs when deploying local 5G systems with an emphasis on enabling sustainable in-building network management.”

Cisco launched its Private 5G platform at the MWC Barcelona event earlier this year. It’s an as-a-service platform that can integrate with existing enterprise systems and WiFi, is billed on a pay-per-use basis, and supports open RAN principles. It also supports multi-tenancy capabilities that in this instance means multiple local 5G service providers can share core network assets.

“The technology, in combination and integrated with the rest of the technology stack, can really solve significant customer problems,” Michael Beesley, CTO for service provider networking at Cisco, recently told SDxCentral in an interview. “So we’re bullish on the space and we continue to invest or even accelerate our investments.”

Airspan supplied its single chassis 5G base station that includes the radio unit (RU), distributed unit (DU), and central unit (CU). The vendor was part of Cisco’s initial Private 5G platform trials.

JTower provided its local 5G shared system that uses the DAS technology to support network and resource sharing. Mitsui Knowledge Industry put the pieces together and conducted the end-to-end 5G testing.

Japan has been at the forefront of open RAN development, with carriers and vendors both pushing the technology.

Telecom giant NTT DoCoMo just this week signed a partnership with European-based telecom operator Vodafone to tie their respective open RAN testing environments together. This is targeted at reducing redundancy and costs for vendors in test environments.

And upstart operator Rakuten has based its entire wireless network deployment model on an open RAN architecture. This includes substantial help from domestic vendors like NEC and Fujitsu.