SOLiD Americas was accorded a $27.6 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund to further develop its open RAN technology for in-building use.

The vendor, which was founded in South Korea in 1998, is developing an open RAN radio unit (RU) for neutral host 5G services inside of buildings.

SOLiD stated its RU “enables simple and economical use of 4G and 5G spectrum for greater service agility, scalability and efficiency”.

The grant awarded by the wireless fund is part of a plan to advance multi-operator open RU signal source technology that is integrated with DAS infrastructure to improve in-building configurations.

As part of the project, SOLiD will develop open RAN-compliant products to support the latest RAN-sharing models, such as multi-operator radio access network (MORAN) architectures.

It stated the evolution of neutral host RAN sharing infrastructure will enable efficient, scalable, and cost-effective design, deployment, and maintenance of in-building 5G networks.

The NTIA’s fund is a ten-year, $1.5 billion programme designed to spur in-country innovation across wireless network technologies.