Japan-based Kyocera revealed plans to partner with six telecoms suppliers in Asia to set up an open radio unit (RU) group in early March, ahead of a move into the segment with AI-capable 5G virtualised base stations.

Kyocera stated it aims to advance the global open RAN ecosystem, enabling more mid-sized vendors to join the market and work with operators in Europe, the US and Asia.

The company supplies industrial, semiconductor and electronic components, and devices.

It plans to launch the O-RU Alliance at MWC2025 Barcelona.

The company intends to make its openRAN central and distributed unit platforms available to members to enable joint interoperability testing and also disclose a reference design for an interface processing unit.

Founding members of the O-RU Alliance are Alpha Networks, Microelectronics Technology and Winston NeWeb from Taiwan; HFR and SOLiD from Korea; and India-based WDN Technologies.

The alliance plans to expand membership gradually, Kyocera stated.

Kyocera added it officially started full-scale development of a 5G virtualised base station.