Open-RAN Vendor Certifies with Global Carriers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Open-RAN Pioneer Accelleran Earns Carrier-Grade Interoperability Certification, Clearing Path for Multi-Vendor 5G Rollouts Across Three Continents
Antwerp-based vendor becomes first European SME to pass UK government-backed SONIC Labs test regime, validating seamless integration with Vodafone, Telefónica and Orange radios

Antwerp, Belgium – 22 November 2025

Accelleran today announced it has received the telecom industry’s most stringent Open-RAN interoperability certification after its cloud-native 5G stack passed end-to-end (E2E) testing alongside radios from three global tier-1 carriers. The milestone, awarded at the UK’s Open Testing and Integration Centre (OTIC), positions the 140-employee vendor as the first European scale-up to meet the carrier-network tier requirements published in January by the Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT).

The 12-week trial—overseen by Ofcom and funded by the UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology—verified that Accelleran’s centralised (CU) and distributed (DU) units interoperate with radios from Vodafone, Telefónica and Orange without vendor-specific tweaks or proprietary extensions. Testing covered 5G Standalone (SA) scenarios including massive-MIMO, 100 MHz NR carriers and 4G/5G dual-connectivity, achieving 99.97 % uplink reliability at 1 Gb/s throughput under 3GPP TS 38.141 load conditions .

“Carriers no longer have to choose between best-of-breed economics and proven performance,” said Accelleran CEO Koen Van Vreckem. “This badge gives MNOs procurement-grade evidence that our open-source-based RAN software drops into brownfield as cleanly as any single-vendor stack—only at one-third the cap-ex.”

Market data released last week by STL Partners projects Open-RAN RU, DU and CU shipments to grow at 64 % CAGR through 2030, reaching USD 18.7 billion and representing 38 % of global outdoor macro spend . Interoperability certification is emerging as a gating item: a GSMA survey of 42 operators found 83 % will require O-RAN Alliance or GCOT badges in 2026 tenders, up from 21 % in 2023 .

Accelleran’s certification covers the full GCOT “carrier network tier,” meaning its software satisfies more than 300 test cases spanning fronthaul conformance, security hardening, and elastic scalability to 10,000 cells. Post-certification benchmarking in SONIC Labs showed a 42 % reduction in mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) versus incumbent stacks when mixing radios from different suppliers, a gain attributed to the vendor’s cloud-native micro-service architecture and open FCAPS interfaces .

The company will immediately begin field pilots with Vodafone Spain (rural Andalucía) and Orange Romania (urban Cluj-Napoca), each integrating Accelleran CU/DU software on Arm-based servers with third-party radios already deployed. Vodafone estimates the open architecture will shave EUR 0.8 per subscriber off annual opex across its European footprint by enabling AI-driven energy savings and zero-touch provisioning .

Accelleran plans a Series-B raise of EUR 35 million in Q1-2026 to scale support teams in Madrid, Bucharest and Tokyo. Proceeds will fund 24×7 carrier-grade SLAs and continued upstream contribution to the O-RAN Software Community (OSC) and Linux Foundation’s SRAN project.

About Accelleran
Founded in Antwerp in 2013, Accelleran delivers cloud-native Open-RAN software that lets mobile operators deploy 5G like Wi-Fi—fast, open and software-defined. The company’s dRAX™ platform is live in ports, airports and private campuses across Europe, Japan and the Americas. Accelleran is a contributing member of the O-RAN Alliance, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the European Union’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS-JU).

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