AmpliTech And Northeastern Demonstrate The First Open-Source Prototype Of A Massive MIMO O-RAN System Achieving O-RAN Category B Operation In A Laboratory Environment

AmpliTech Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMPG, AMPGR, AMPGZ))) today announced that its AmpliTech 5G Division and Researchers at Northeastern University's Institute for Intelligent Networked Systems (INSI), have successfully demonstrated the first open-source prototype of a massive MIMO (mMIMO) O-RAN system achieving O-RAN Category B operation in a laboratory environment. The demonstration integrates AmpliTech's commercial-grade mMIMO Category B radio unit with the OpenAirInterface (OAI) CU/DU stack, marking the first time a full, end-to-end massive MIMO O-RAN system has been assembled entirely from open, interoperable components.

The demonstration combined AmpliTech's mMIMO O-RAN Category B radio unit with OAI's CU/DU into a single cohesive, standards-compliant platform. The INSI team showcased hybrid beamforming capabilities with a 2-layer MIMO configuration, demonstrating sustained throughput under mobility conditions with proper beam management. Critically, it validates that AmpliTech's radio unit, designed for commercial deployment, can operate at full performance within a fully open, multi-vendor stack.

Massive MIMO systems, which use large antenna arrays to serve multiple users simultaneously through spatial multiplexing, have historically required tightly integrated, vendor-specific implementations. This demonstration challenges that assumption by showing that the full stack, from the physical layer up through the RAN control plane, can be assembled from open, interoperable components, with no reliance on proprietary, closed solutions. Category B is the technically demanding fronthaul interface that enables this at massive MIMO scale, and its successful validation here marks a first for open-source RAN.