The OCUDU technical project community, now part of the new OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, is proud to announce “OCUDU 26.04,” the initial OCUDU technical project release. This is an important milestone that brings together a strong foundation for open, cloud-native CU/DU innovation and continued progress toward production-ready Open source RAN deployments.
This release builds on a substantial body of prior development and introduces a broad set of enhancements across radio capabilities, mobility, observability, management, and performance. This release introduces advanced multi-antenna techniques for faster data uploads and enhances positioning accuracy for location-based services. Connectivity is made more resilient through smoother handovers and more robust signal monitoring, even within high-frequency bands. Additionally, the update optimizes device battery life, streamlines network orchestration, and integrates hardware acceleration to deliver lower latency and higher overall throughput. The release also includes additional bug fixes and improvements to overall stability and performance.
Why this release matters
“OCUDU 26.04” marks a pivotal milestone as the project matures from a single-vendor initiative into a truly community-led ecosystem. This release delivers a feature-rich, open source CU/DU foundation specifically designed to meet the rigorous operational demands of real-world telco cloud environments.
By integrating community-driven enhancements in mobility, O1-based management, and hardware acceleration, OCUDU 26.04 simultaneously advances the project’s performance, manageability, and deployability. This collaborative evolution ensures the software remains a cutting-edge, transparent baseline for the next generation of open telecommunications.
The release also shows clear momentum in the project’s evolution. Earlier versions added capabilities such as the CU/DU split, RAN slicing, E2 support in the CU, separate applications for CU-CP and CU-UP, Release 18.5 E1AP ASN.1 updates, automatic SBOM generation, and simplified Docker and Helm configurations. Taken together, that progression helps illustrate how the OCUDU technical project has matured from its earlier public releases into today’s initial project milestone under the new OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation.
What’s new in “OCUDU 26.04”
Some of the key additions in this release include:
- Expanded radio and spectrum support, including FR2 120 KHz
- Stronger uplink capabilities, including UL MIMO and support for aperiodic and narrowband SRS
- Enhanced mobility support, including Xn and Conditional Handover
- Improved resiliency and efficiency, with features such as RRC_INACTIVE and RoHC
- Better radio monitoring and positioning-related support, including CSI-RS-based RL monitoring and NRPPa using RSRP and SRS
- Operational and deployment improvements, including M-plane support through O1 helper elements
- Performance optimization options, including hardware accelerator support through DPDK BBDEV
A milestone built on steady progress
“OCUDU 26.04” is labeled in the release notes as the “initial OCUDU release,” but it is built on a development history under srsRAN that includes an initial public release in 23.3 and a series of subsequent releases that introduced features such as Open Fronthaul for split 7.2 O-RAN radio units, E2 interface support, multi-cell support per gNB, intra-gNB handover, DRX, QoS-aware scheduling, and expanded metrics reporting.
Far more than an incremental update, this version serves as a testament to the project’s consistent momentum and expanding capabilities across the entire stack.
Looking ahead
This release signifies a new era of collaborative innovation under the OCUDU Ecosystem Foundation, uniting diverse global contributions to deliver the sophisticated capabilities required for modern, cloud-native RAN deployments. By transitioning to this open, multi-stakeholder model, “OCUDU 26.04” establishes a powerful new baseline for developers and operators to build the next generation of transparent telecom infrastructure.
Read the full “OCUDU 26.04” Release Notes here: https://ocudu-docs-604e90.gitlab.io/releases/release_notes