- Critics contend AT&T’s open RAN network isn’t as open as it should be
- AT&T says its strategy with Ericsson is all about a multi-vendor ecosystem
- The operator says the only way the open RAN ecosystem is going to get scale is through incumbent operators jumping on the open RAN bandwagon
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, BARCELONA – No matter how many times Ericsson and its partners insist they’re doing bona fide open RAN, naysayers in the industry say it’s not truly open. So we decided to cut through the noise and asked AT&T Network CTO Yigal Elbaz about it when we met with him at MWC this week.
AT&T awarded Ericsson a $14 billion, multi-year open RAN contract in 2023, and it’s currently in the midst of replacing Nokia infrastructure gear with Ericsson’s nationwide. But a lot of people say a single vendor steering the ship isn’t really all that open after all.
According to Elbaz, though, patience is the watchword.
“We are moving and deploying open RAN,” he said, in a way we might imagine speaking to 2-year-old who can’t quite grasp when to stop with the questions. “We, AT&T, are moving to an open RAN architecture. Whatever people are saying, I don’t know. We are moving to an open architecture with Ericsson."
When talking about open networks, it’s the radio suppliers that often are top of mind because that's where most of the network capital gets allocated. AT&T already announced Fujitsu and Mavenir as additional radio vendors, on top of Ericsson, that have been certified to run on AT&T’s network. Plans call for deploying their radios starting near the end of 2025, Elbaz said.
But AT&T’s whole network transition is bigger than that.
Going forward, “we want to simplify how we operate the wireless network,” he said. “We’re doing this in two directions. One is we’re making sure all of our vendors integrate with the same management system. Remember, it’s open and more data is going to flow into this. On top of this, this is where we can deploy what we call our rApps.”
With rApps, the intention is to bring in different companies’ innovation that in the old days wouldn’t have had a chance to see the light of day.
“Now we can introduce those apps on top of our network for energy saving, self-optimized network, spectral efficiency,” he said. “One management system helps us to integrate all of the vendors,” making the whole operation much easier.
For AT&T’s 5G standalone (SA) core, that’s still ongoing with Microsoft Nexus, which is where different vendors building the SA core are all running on the Microsoft network cloud. “It’s a multi-vendor core,” he added.
Greenfield vs. established networks
Dish Network/EchoStar in the U.S., Rakuten in Japan and in Germany are examples of greenfield networks that are big on open RAN. The problem is there’s not enough new greenfield networks to give open RAN the economies of scale that it needs to thrive.
That’s where incumbents like AT&T come in. Their buy-in should provide encouragement to smaller vendors that want to break into the space, according to Elbaz.
When you have an established network joining the open RAN journey, “that is what drives scale. There is no scale in open RAN without the established network,” he said. “There is no scale without us.”
Scale will only be created by existing operators moving to an open RAN architecture, and existing operators will move to an open RAN architecture only when their incumbent vendors move to an open architecture, according to Elbaz.
“In our case, Ericsson did,” he concluded.
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