- McRae, Chief Architect at BT Group, was reportedly optimistic about in‑house development of Ultra MIMO antenna technology based on foundational work carried out by the O‑RAN Alliance.
Neil McRae, Chief Architect at BT Group, was reportedly optimistic about in‑house development of Ultra MIMO antenna technology based on foundational work carried out by the O‑RAN Alliance, of which BT is a member (BTwatch, #310). In an article by FierceWireless, McRae said Ultra MIMO will take massive MIMO to a “new level”, powered by algorithms, signal processing, and interference management technologies developed by BT engineers. He explained that one reason why BT recently joined the Alliance was to gain access to MIMO radio capabilities, “so we can use some algorithms to get much more capacity from a MIMO platform”. The article did not elaborate on the performance indicator improvements expected by McRae from Ultra MIMO compared to massive MIMO. He was eager to highlight Ericsson and Nokia — both O‑RAN Alliance members — as “fantastic partners”, and similarly put Huawei Technologies into the ‘fantastic’ category, although the Chinese supplier does not belong to the O‑RAN club. “But we feel like we need more choice and capability”, added McRae. “Our goal is to work with those guys [O‑RAN] and others to drive next requirements in radio technology to ultimately give us more capacity”, he said.
