The high level of interest in open network architectures, triggered by operators’ need to transform their cost base in 5G, and intensified by the political stand-offs between the USA and China, is assumed to provide significant opportunities for new vendors.
This is clearly true on several levels:
- A network in which the key interfaces are fully open allows an operator to mix and match equipment from different vendors.
- A network in which the functions are virtualized or containerized, and are neutral to the hardware underneath them, allows for the use of COTS white boxes in place of complex vertically integrated base stations, switches, routers and core appliances.
- If the virtual network functions (VNFs) are managed by open orchestrators, or by standard container frameworks like Kubernetes, the VNFs can come from multiple vendors, enabling many combinations of hardware and software supplier, all glued together by standard specifications.
That is the vision, and several organizations are working hard, and pulling together a wide array of stakeholders, to put the building blocks in place. The O-RAN Alliance, Small Cell Forum (SCF), Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) are all addressing different aspects of the disaggregated mobile network.
The initial impetus came from large operators such as Deutsche Telekom, AT&T and Vodafone, looking for a more open and price-competitive supply chain. The involvement of webscalers, particularly Facebook via TIP, accelerated the transition of the proprietary networks to cloud-based architectures with cloud economics. Now, the open initiatives, in particular O-RAN, have been adopted by various parties which are keen to build an alternative 5G ecosystem as a counterweight to Huawei, and in the USA which is leading that charge, some factions also believe open systems are a way to resurrect a US telecoms equipment business.
So will this dream – often discussed at the start of 4G too, we should not forget – come true this time? The move to the cloud, with its inherent scale and openness, certainly makes it fully possible that the supply chain will be disrupted in 5G networks. The weight of large operators is important, but so is the diversification of the base of mobile network deployers – new entrants, private network operators, enterprises and so on will not have the same ties to the large vendors, and their smaller scale will make the adoption of a new platform less risky.
But there is another scenario – that fully open, cloud-based networks do indeed become the dominant model for 5G, but that the supply chain remains under the control of the same players.
Those large players are likely to see their territories constrained, if current geopolitics persist. That does not necessarily favor new entrants however – just a concentration of the sales of Huawei and ZTE in certain markets, and of Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Cisco and Apple in others.
The open platforms may therefore be less global than the 3GPP ones. A split of the world into two 5G camps is possible, one dominated by the Chinese ecosystem and one by the rest, and each with its own set of architectures. That would be in contrast to the global nature of the later 4G and early 5G landscapes, in which 3GPP standards and open platforms finally achieved worldwide uniformity, after the divisions of 3G and early 4G. O-RAN itself resulted from the merger of a group led by AT&T and one led by China Mobile (and despite its US leanings, its next plugfest will be in Beijing). The biggest equipment and device suppliers came from China, Korea, the Nordics and the USA, and all sold globally.
The potential loss of global reach may make any of these giants more vulnerable to challengers; and the open multivendor platforms certainly give those challengers weapons that they did not have before, to build credible alternatives for operators. The successes of start-ups like Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless are partly based on their support for open platforms, which greatly reduces the risk, for an operator, of selecting a smaller supplier.
But the large suppliers will not cede any ground without a fight and they have powerful weapons too. One, they can adopt the open interfaces themselves, and combine them with their superior experience and resources in integration, engineering and support. Nokia’s hijacking of the O-RAN RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) – also being eyed by other large suppliers like Juniper and Cisco – demonstrates that risk for the open ecosystem, and last week, it was supported by AT&T, the ringleader in trying to up-end the supply chain.
Operators certainly want to foster challenger vendors in order to put pressure on their established suppliers to be more open and cooperative (and cheaper). But it is questionable how far the established giants can really cope with a fragmented supply chain and a truly multivendor network. Ironically, the case study of Rakuten Mobile has made some operators more, not less, cautious. Initially, Rakuten’s deployment looked like the biggest proof point to date that an open virtualized network is possible at scale – and not just for relatively constrained networks and business cases, such as rural extensions or campus systems.
But Rakuten’s remarkable openness about its own process and achievement has also thrown a spotlight on its challenges. The large team it had to assemble to integrate solutions from such a large number of suppliers (well over 20); the complexities of optimizing multivendor systems in the BSS and OSS; the challenges of running a vRAN to fully telco-grade standard on cloud infrastructure – all of these will be true of any large-scale multivendor deployment undertaken in the next few years.
Eventually, really off-the-shelf solutions may emerge, allowing a RAN and core to be snapped together from pieces in an app store, as Rakuten envisages. But it will be a long time before large operators will feel confident to entrust their primary business platform to something so immature.
As Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst at IDC, told SDxCentral: “The elephant in the room with regards to open RAN is, of course, integration.” He cites the lesson from NFV, when “asking vendors to integrate on behalf of their competitors did not pan out”, while vendor-neutral integrators need to acquire new skills for the RAN, and work out the complexities of risk, accountability and pricing in their deals with operators.
The past weeks, however, have seen further interesting developments from the smaller vendors, with all the positive signs that innovation is on the increase and barriers to new solutions are lowering. But the political co-opting of these open movements by the US and Chinese governments, in particular, is likely to increase operator suspicion of them, outside of projects that are actually able to access government funds or subsidies. And the past weeks have also seen the big vendors, after a period of looking somewhat rudderless in the open network seas, mobilizing their best weapons again.
Nokia and Ericsson are battling to ensure that Samsung and NEC, let alone start-ups, don’t grab O-RAN leadership.
The new release of ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) features solutions from Nokia, Cisco, IBM and other giants. It is also heavily supported by Microsoft Azure, whose recent acquisition of Affirmed and Metaswitch highlighted the interest of the webscalers not just in building their own telecoms platforms, but controlling the supply chain – which could just put a different oligopoly in place of the current one.
Verizon is expanding its white box program, but its major new partner is not a disruptive start-up, but Cisco.
The biggest challenges to a truly open and multivendor ecosystems, then, are not technology or even the open specs themselves, but the need for small players to build confidence and the large-scale integration resources needed to deploy a major telecoms network. The answer may lie in new partnership dynamics between innovators, webscalers and established technologists, but those will take time to develop too. It is a time of hope for a new industry, but also a critical juncture, when the real beneficiaries of the move to open platforms may turn out to be the architects of the old closed platforms after all.