Altiostar
Understanding Altiostar (Open RAN)
For 30 years, building a cell phone network was like buying an Apple product: if you bought the phone, you had to use Apple software, Apple cables, and Apple chargers. The massive telecom giants (Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei) built cell towers the exact same way—as completely locked, proprietary hardware. A software company named Altiostar successfully destroyed this monopoly.
The Hardware Monopoly
If Verizon bought an Ericsson radio for the top of the tower, the Ericsson radio refused to speak standard computer language. It spoke a secret, proprietary language. Because of this, Verizon was forced to buy a massive, multi-million dollar proprietary Ericsson computer for the bottom of the tower just to control the radio. Verizon was permanently trapped in the Ericsson ecosystem.
The vRAN Revolution (Virtualization)
Altiostar realized that the massive computer at the bottom of the tower didn't need to be proprietary hardware; it could just be software.
- Altiostar wrote the incredibly complex 5G math (the Baseband) entirely in C++ code.
- They put this code onto a standard, cheap Dell or HP computer server (the exact same servers that run Amazon Web Services).
- Because the brain of the tower is now just software (vRAN - Virtualized RAN), the telecom company can buy a cheap radio antenna from Company A, run it using Altiostar software, and completely bypass the massive hardware giants. This is the foundation of the Open RAN movement.
Key Equations
Altiostar (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten Symphony) is a disruptive telecommunications software vendor that pioneered the commercialization of Open RAN (O-RAN) and virtualized...
Key specifications:
0 dB | 1 mW | 30 dB | 1 W | 110 GHz | 50 dB
Power: P(dBm) = 10log(PmW), 0dBm = 1mW
Comparison
| Aspect | Altiostar Spec | Typical Range | Impact | Design Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary function | Historically, the global telecom infrast... | Application-dep. | Critical | Verify in sim |
| Operating range | If a carrier bought an Ericsson radio, t... | Application-dep. | Critical | Verify in sim |
| Performance | Altiostar broke this hardware lock-in by... | Application-dep. | Critical | Verify in sim |
| Integration | The massive telecom giants (Ericsson, No... | Application-dep. | Critical | Verify in sim |
| Trade-off | A software company named Altiostar succe... | Application-dep. | Critical | Verify in sim |
Frequently Asked Questions
Who actually uses Altiostar?
The most famous deployment on Earth is Rakuten Mobile in Japan. Rakuten built the world's first entirely virtualized, cloud-native 5G mobile network from scratch. They didn't buy a single proprietary baseband box from Ericsson or Nokia. They ran their entire nationwide 5G network using Altiostar software running on cheap, standard data-center servers. It was such a massive success that Rakuten eventually bought Altiostar outright.
Is vRAN slower than proprietary hardware?
Initially, yes. A proprietary Ericsson hardware chip (an ASIC) is physically hardwired to process radio math instantly. When Altiostar tried to do that exact same math using standard Intel processors, the processors were too slow, causing latency. To fix this, Intel had to invent specialized 'Hardware Accelerators' (like the vRAN Boost instructions inside Xeon processors) to mathematically assist the software and handle the brutal speeds of 5G.
How does Altiostar talk to the radio?
Using the eCPRI protocol and the O-RAN Alliance specifications. Instead of using a secret, proprietary language, the radio and the Altiostar software communicate using a completely open, public, standardized internet protocol over standard fiber-optic cables. This forces all hardware manufacturers to build radios that are universally compatible with any software.