February 6, 2023 — TIP sees two critical barriers that are inhibiting the widespread adoption of Open RAN and creating market inefficiencies:
- the lack of [mobile network operator] MNO purchasing confidence, and
- supply chain inefficiencies in navigating a newly disaggregated, multi-vendor environment given that wireless systems have historically been closed and controlled by a single vendor.
A far greater number of MNOs need to attain confidence in Open RAN solutions to trigger the level of high-volume purchasing and deployments at scale necessary to impact unit pricing sufficiently to represent a competitive new option in relation to incumbent vendors. Therefore, achieving vendor diversity requires facilitating major structural efficiencies within the supply chain to streamline efforts across hundreds of operators and their vendors
Because of the unique challenges of Open RAN, and based on TIP’s experience, TIP envisions a well-coordinated engine for reducing the complexities inherent in carrier-grade Open RAN system integration. As a trusted neutral party at the center of the global ecosystem, TIP sees the key challenge facing Open RAN deployment – namely, the need for a comprehensive coordination and enablement engine designed to harmonize market fragmentation, drive greater industry coordination, create supply chain efficiencies, and build marketplace confidence through formal certification of Open RAN interoperability at the system level. In TIP’s observation, an entire life cycle approach to Open RAN system integration and validation is required to engender market confidence and catalyze the desired step change in the rate of adoption and deployment of these systems today and for innovation cycles to come.
The system certification function should include coordination of the entire system lifecycle from beginning to end – that is, helping operators and vendors to develop system roadmaps, all the way to the point of procurement and benchmarking post-sales customer satisfaction. This includes:
- harmonizing operator requirements;
- roadmap and lifecycle management;
- system release certification (“SRC”);
- solution and integration benchmarking and operational satisfaction surveys; and
- system procurement, including a readily accessible digital catalog for vendors to showcase their products to MNOs.
At the heart of this full life cycle system certification is a federated global network of certification providers (independent labs and system integrators who are TIP-accredited).
Such an SRC function will play a major part in assuring time-to-deployment. SRC for “complete Open RAN systems” (built using multiple vendors’ hardware and software products) will replace “buyer-beware” product compatibility doubts with confidence in proven full Open RAN systems. TIP’s theory that a certification process will help restore supply chain efficiencies is backed up by TIP’s “SRC Pilot” conducted in 2020, which showed a 60% reduction in time to validate an Open RAN Release. The pilot demonstrated the direct value of certification in reducing operator time and effort to achieve successful Open RAN deployment.