There’s no doubt that the open RAN movement has taken the wireless industry by storm. Interest is at an all-time high, but is there a risk the whole thing will blow up due to industry sniping? After all, some players would like to see the big incumbent vendors get out of the way, making room for the new and, presumably, improved set of players.
Addressing open RAN deployment challenges is just one of the topics to be addressed during the ever-popular Fierce Wireless 5G Blitz Week, the next iteration of which is March 28-31 and free for registrants. One session, set for 11 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, tackles open RAN deployment challenges.
After some fits and starts – some more than others – big vendors like Ericsson and Nokia say they’re on board with the open RAN movement. Whether they’re truly “open” or not is up to interpretation, but they’re not going away quietly into the night.
Broadly speaking, some headwinds are bound to come up as with any new technology. Operators have been building telecom networks for years, and some inertia can be expected when new technologies come along.
“The biggest concern that we hear from operators … is the integration issue,” said Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence. Operators like the ability to mix and match from different vendors and reap the benefits of supply chain diversity. “But there’s the question of who is going to pull this together, who is going to integrate it.”
If there’s not one vendor controlling the end-to-end deployment, then who’s going to take that on?
Dish Network is one example of a company building a greenfield 5G network based on open RAN. Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said during his company’s most recent earnings call that Dish wound up acting as system integrator. It wasn’t a role they thought they were going to take on, but with all the vendors, someone had to step up and be the “glue” that holds them together, he said.
Too late to fail?
In terms of the risks of the whole endeavor failing, some would say it’s far too late for that.
“I’m not too worried about it failing,” Jarich said. “We’ve already seen success,” in the form of operators like Japan’s Rakuten and the involvement of more IT players in the wireless space. In addition, announcements at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona showed that even vendors that aren’t big open RAN supporters are paying attention to the principles happening in the space.
But if a big incumbent vendor like Nokia claims to have an open RAN solution, is it really open if it’s an end-to-end Nokia solution?
If it meets the technical criteria, the answer is “yes,” according to Jarich. “I think we have to because the definition of open doesn’t necessarily say you have to have a bunch of pieces from a bunch of different vendors,” he said. “We don’t say that in the IT world. We don’t say that it’s not open if you just choose to go with one vendor.”
Some operators will prefer to start with gear from a familiar supplier, and that’s their prerogative. “It’s a new technology and I want to make sure it works. [If] I want to have the flexibility to add some stuff later, that’s completely fair,” he said.
Formerly with Nokia, Michael Murphy is now chief technology officer for Ericsson North America. He said the first challenge to overcome with open RAN is the completion of specifications to a degree that permits the “true mix and match of vendors” without onerous agreements to cover gaps or different interpretations.
After that is ascertaining that products of sufficient maturity are available to meet or exceed the performance of solutions that exist today with an attractive total cost of ownership.
“Both of these are on good trajectories but require more time; large scale experience, to date, is limited,” he said. For example, adequate security specifications that cover all interfaces completely, as identified by Germany’s cybersecurity agency, needs attention, he explained.
Finally, “assuming we have good specifications and products, the next challenge will be the issue of additional costs when a new vendor is introduced in brownfield situations,” he said, referring to costs of managing that vendor and systems integration expenses caused by mix-and-match scenarios. These are issues for the operator community to consider, he said.
Murphy said openness is unlikely to fail and open RAN is one component of that trend. One question that remains revolves around the timing for deployments given specification and product maturity. It’s also not inconceivable that some of the work currently done by the O-RAN Alliance will shift into 3GPP, particularly as 6G work starts. For all these reasons, “we think the timing of large-scale adoption, in the true spirit of open RAN, is some time away,” he told Fierce.