Fierce Network was able to catch up with Yossi Cohen, president and CEO of Ericsson North America, at last week’s MWC show in Barcelona where open RAN was all the rage.
We asked Cohen about Ericsson’s perspective on a dispute that had arisen within the O-RAN Alliance last year. Two different camps had different opinions about an uplink performance improvement (ULPI) specification for Massive MIMO radios.
Ericsson led the camp that wanted the equalizer function placed in the radio. While other members of the Alliance, including Mavenir, wanted the equalizer function placed as software in the distributed unit (DU).
Cohen told Fierce that Ericsson must compete globally against the likes of Huawei, which is not trying to comply with O-RAN Alliance specifications.
Ericsson favored its position on ULPI – because the vendor felt the interface in the radio would have the best performance to compete on the world stage, he said.
He also noted that the O-RAN Alliance’s agreement to support the equalizer inside either the radio or in the compute DU satisfied Ericsson’s concerns.
However, John Baker, SVP of business development with Mavenir, told us that the two different choices could create some problems.
Baker said Mavenir is committed to supporting four interfaces on the DU, but if an operator chooses an Ericsson DU that does not support all interfaces, they will be locked to Ericsson as their supplier.
Watch the video to hear more about what Cohen had to say — and check out our other news from the big show here.