ACCoRD
A $42M NTIA-funded effort to make Open RAN deployable in the real world
Role. Lead, Open RAN integration and architecture at the ISU site, 2024 – present. Funding. $42M, NTIA Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (NOFO-1). Full name. Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments.
What it is
ACCoRD is a multi-institution effort to build an Open RAN testing and certification pipeline that vendors, operators, and integrators can actually use. It’s the kind of evaluation infrastructure that the Open RAN ecosystem has been missing. The premise is straightforward: open standards only deliver on their promise if you can verify that components from different vendors interoperate under realistic conditions. ACCoRD is building the labs, the test cases, and the integration know-how to make that happen.
What I do
At the ISU site, I lead integration and architecture work on the Open RAN stack: the O-CU, O-DU, O-RU, and the 5G core. The day-to-day involves taking components from different vendors, getting them to talk to each other across reference points that are technically defined but practically messy, and then exercising them with workloads that mirror what a real operator would throw at them. A lot of the value is in the unglamorous middle: the cabling, the timing, the interface conformance, the failure modes you only find by running things for weeks at a time.
Why it matters
Open RAN gets debated in the abstract more often than it gets tested in concrete. ACCoRD exists to move the conversation from architecture diagrams to multi-vendor systems running in racks. The faster that pipeline matures, the faster operators can deploy with confidence, and the faster the U.S. supply chain for next-generation RAN becomes resilient.