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AT&T and Verizon pledged their souls to Open RAN this week
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President Biden is running with the idea of open RAN being a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE
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The dream of a truly multi-vendor open RAN looks to be largely just an illusion
AT&T and Verizon may have pledged their souls to open radio access network (open RAN) technology this week, but it may not be the all-singing, all-dancing multi-vendor lovefest that some commentators had been expecting for the standard.
To whit, the United States government has committed $42 million to speed the development of 5G open radio access network (open RAN), cementing the future for the specification with those aforementioned major carriers.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will fund a project by a consortium of US and foreign operators, equipment vendors and academics to establish an R&D center in Dallas.
The aim is to establish the standard as an alternative to the global number one vendor, Chinese bigwig Huawei.
Indeed, President Biden is running with the idea of open RAN being a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE. According to the Washington Post he has mentioned open RAN to multiple world leaders.
Of course, for open RAN to be a viable global alternative, it needs to be inexpensive, reliable and available, which is why the government has hooked up with domestic and “friendly” foreign operators and vendors to establish the technology. A side effect to this strategy, the post says, might be that U.S. vendors get into the pure RAN game again, at least that’s the hope.
Are you listening Cisco?
So what is open RAN?
Open RAN refers generically to architectures that, firstly, have disaggregated components. Remote radio heads and baseband units (BBUs) are split into a centralized unit (CU), a distributed unit (DU) and a radio unit (RU).
The DU is connected to the RU via the front-haul connection, and the CU is connected to DU via a mid-haul link. In turn, the CU is connected via a backhaul to the mobile core. In open RAN, the interfaces between the CU, DU and RU need to be agreed-upon and openly defined, allowing the interchanging of CU, DU and RU from different vendors.
You can read more about the mechanics of open RAN here.
Open RAN is supposed to enable operators to mix and match cellular software and hardware more easily, opening up the market to smaller equipment vendors and enabling operators to mix and match equipment from different vendors.
Single- or multi-vendor? That is the question.
After AT&T and Verizon announced open RAN plans. However, those operators just used a single vendor (Ericsson in AT&T’s case) or two (Ericsson and Samsung in Verizon’s case), the dream of a truly multi-vendor open RAN looks to be largely just an illusion.
Deutsche Telekom has a “multi-vendor” agreement in place with Nokia and Fujitsu and has just started to deploy open RAN to kick its long-lasting Huawei habit. “Because they also want Open RAN to be more than just a new interface and support multi-vendor RAN and virtualized RAN, it will take some time for the economics to make sense,” Stephan Pongratz, RAN analyst at Dell’Oro Group told Silverlinings last year.
Smaller greenfield 5G operators like Dish in the U.S. may have gone the multi-vendor route. As EJL Wireless founder Earl Lum said recently it is unrealistic to expect Verizon to use five radio vendors just because it is deploying open RAN equipment. The same (largely) applies to many of the larger operators: No one wants to deal with a mass of equipment vendors.
So, open RAN may realistically end up being largely a game for the Scandinavian telco mafia after all! Although through the delivery of virtualized RAN we can say that Samsung has definitely raised their status as a RAN vendor.
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