HELSINKI, Finland -- Nokia, NEC, LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics have formed the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI). The initiative will focus on basestation architecture and internal interfaces, the companies said.
The initiative is described as an attempt to reduce costs and open up mobile communications basestations to more innovation, but notable absentees from the initiative at this time include Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens, leading providers of mobile communications infrastructure.
Other infrastructure and subsystem suppliers have been invited to join OBSAI, the founding companies said in a statement.
The intention is to develop modular radio base stations featuring open internal interfaces. This will allow manufacturers to focus their research and development efforts on their core competencies and to buy selected radio base station modules from each other and from other module vendors, the companies said.
"Open Base Station Architecture will revolutionize radio base station development," said Jukka Klemettila, OBSAI chairperson in a statement. "It will allow next-generation radio base stations to be built using best-of-breed, shared platforms and modules, available on an open market, whilst letting network suppliers differentiate on system and network-element levels," he said
The four founder members have already agreed a high level architectural definition for standardization.
"We expect detailed specifications to be available by the end of this year. OBSAI is by no means a "closed shop" initiative, we welcome other companies with a similar mindset to drive our industry forward to the next stage," said Klemettila.
OBSAI is intended to complement existing standardization organizations, such as 3GPP, and radio base stations developed using OBSAI would be fully compatible with standard radio interfaces, such as WCDMA, GSM/EDGE and CDMA.
