EchoStar Corporation announced the launch of the Open RAN Center for Integration and Deployment (ORCID), a Open RAN (O-RAN) testing and evaluation lab housed at EchoStar'sCheyenne, Wyoming, data center. The facility, which is supported by a $50 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce'sNational Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (Innovation Fund), offers vendors the opportunity to test and validate O-RAN solutions using EchoStar's live commercial-grade cloud-native Open RAN network. The launch of ORCID, which comes six months after NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson and Innovation Fund Directoranda Toman announced the Innovation Fund grant at an EchoStar 5G site in Las Vegas, provides trusted participants in the U.S. and around the world an opportunity to contribute to the development, deployment, and adoption of open and interoperable standards-based radio access networks.

ORCID's " living laboratory" features a real field test setup, which will help drive the O-RAN ecosystem from the lab to commercial deployment. EchoStar manages the ORCID consortium, which includes Fujitsu, Mavenir, VMware by Broadcom, and a variety of other technology partners. EchoStar, with the help of its consortium partners, validated O-RAN technology at scale across the country, building an O-RAN 5G network that provides connectivity to more than 240 million Americans nationwide.