Open RAN deployments increasingly depend on whether multi-vendor systems can operate seamlessly across a shared environment. As operators adopt disaggregated architectures, interoperability has emerged as a primary constraint, requiring coordination across radios, software platforms, cloud infrastructure and orchestration layers.
The shift reflects a broader change in how telecom systems are developed and validated. Network components that once evolved and were tested in isolation now operate as part of an interconnected stack, spanning connectivity, compute and AI. This introduces new dependencies across vendors and interfaces, making end-to-end validation more complex and more critical to deployment success.
Testing environments designed to replicate real-world conditions have begun to play a larger role in addressing these challenges. Facilities such as VIAVI Solutions’ VALOR lab in Arizona bring together multi-vendor configurations to evaluate interoperability, performance and integration at scale. As AI becomes more embedded in network operations, the need to validate how these systems interact within a unified environment continues to grow.
VIAVI Automated Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN (VALOR) is a purpose-built, AI-enabled Lab-as-a-Service for Open RAN in Chandler, Arizona. To learn more about VALOR, visit: https://www.viavisolutions.com/en-us/valor
Steve Saunders:
How do you test the digital infrastructure of the future before it's even been built? Well, you come here to VALOR. Here in Phoenix, engineers, operators, software developers, cloud architects, and AI specialists are all working together to validate the technologies that will power the next generation of the digital economy.
Wow, this place is clean. So here we are. Welcome to the VALOR Lab, which is funded by the NTIA.
Erik Probstfield:
So Valor is a ORAN test facility. It was funded by the NTIA under a three-year grant from the PW SCIF fund. And the primary objective was to enable and democratize access to ORAN testing for the ecosystem, in particular the US ecosystem.
Come on in, Steve.
Steve Saunders:
Thank you. Wow, this is big.
Erik Probstfield:
So this is our RF chamber testing facility. This is a radio here and you have a receiver over there so you get a very isolated source and receiver.
Steve Saunders:
You get a clean environment-
Erik Probstfield:
Correct.
Steve Saunders:
... in order to find out exactly what's going on.
Erik Probstfield:
That's right.
Steve Saunders:
And what's really interesting is that they're no longer testing networks in isolation. They're increasingly testing the entire infrastructure stack. For decades, communications evolved in silos. Now what's fascinating about Valor is that it brings together three of the most important layers of the modern digital economy, connectivity, compute and AI, not individually, together. Today's systems increasingly span the radios in the RAN, software platforms, cloud environments, both centralized and distributed, AI frameworks, orchestration layers and distributed compute resources. And they operate across borders from carrier to enterprise and industry. So the challenge is no longer validating products. It's validating ecosystems of multiple technologies of multiple vendors. It's all about the ORAN.
So you're not really just testing technology anymore, you're actually testing the ecosystem.
Akash Gupta:
Absolutely. Yeah. We are testing ecosystem because if you look at the radio vendor, RAN vendor and other part of the solution, they are disintegrated. And what we're doing is we are providing integrated solution and we are testing the interface and we are making sure that they are able to communicate to each other when they get deployed by operators.
Steve Saunders:
I mean, it all goes in a huge circle, doesn't it? Because ORAN is designed to enable interoperability and open up the RAN access market. And in order to do that, the test lab has to be one of the first implementers of all of those first principles of interoperability. And the answer to all of those things, it turns out, is AI, both as a solution but also as a test protocol as well.
Srinivas Sriram:
Absolutely. How would we optimize these solutions or bring faster to the markets? This is helping enormously cutting down our integration times, debugging times and enabling faster testing results.
Akash Gupta:
If you look at today, AI-RAN is basically bringing AI technology inside the RAN. AI intelligence, you can bring inside the algorithm of RAN network sitting inside the radio to basically function faster and much better efficient way where you can optimize the network or predict the issues, alarms well ahead of time.
Steve Saunders:
So as communications evolves beyond networks and into the broader digital infrastructure stack, environments like this one at Valor are becoming absolutely vital because the future won't be defined by any single technology or any single vendor. It will be defined by how effectively we can integrate connectivity, compute and AI into this single operational system. And increasingly, that process starts somewhere like this.