Linux Foundation, DoW take aim at closed AI-RAN stacks with open source
Linux Foundation, DoW take aim at closed AI-RAN stacks with open source
Publish Date: 2026-03-23 18:55:00
Source Domain: www.rcrwireless.com
The Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation challenges RAN gatekeeping that has been stalling the open RAN movement
Opinions on open RAN (Radio Access Network) are mixed. On the surface, the movement looks less alive now than it did 8 years ago.
So far, adoption has remained concentrated to a handful of providers like, AT&T, Orange and Vodafone. Moreover, the supplier diversity that it promised never quite came to pass. Ericsson and Nokia still remain the primary suppliers in the ecosystem, and according to Dell’Oro Group, things are not likely to look up in the future. The market research firm predicted multi-vendor RAN to account for less than 5% of the total RAN deployments by 2030.
With all that, it looked like the movement was losing its thunder, but the conversation is opening up once again. Right before MWC, the Linux Foundation formed the Open Centralized Unit Distributed Unit (OCUDU) Ecosystem Foundation, an initiative to build, scale, and sustain the OCUDU Project assets and establish a reference architecture for RAN.
OCUDU represents a strategic effort to keep the open RAN technology evolving. It aims to create an open transparent foundation built on open-source code on which innovation and integration can happen much faster. Crucially, it focuses on enhancing two central computing components of the open RAN technology with AI: Distributed Unit (DU) and Central Unit (CU), without depending solely on Nvidia’s stack.
Building on the lessons and successes of open RAN, OCUDU is a fully software-defined stack that can be deployed across multiple hardware platforms, whether that’s for 5G or 6G in the future, unlocking an array of new use cases with AI integration.
The initiative is backed by the U.S. Department of War (DoW) whose goal is to build an open-source CU/DU software stack for 5G and 6G RAN that breaks vendor lock-ins and…