One of the dangers of any attempt to achieve open platforms is fragmentation between competing approaches, especially if large vendors (or even countries) use them as proxies for their own wars. While O-RAN appears to have achieved significant momentum in the macro RAN – and dovetails with the ambitions of Nokia, Samsung, NEC and the US government, among others – there are other initiatives developing interesting interfaces, such as the Open Networking Foundation and Small Cell Forum.
Meanwhile, Ericsson has yet to throw whole-hearted weight behind any of the options, despite some hedging about O-RAN, and could rock the boat in future. Other vendors, like Cisco, are trying to create their own ‘open’ initiatives. Cisco’s is called Open vRAN and was unveiled in February 2018. It has been quiet about the project recently, but last week provided an update on a cooperation with Telenor, including an open vRAN trial at the MNO’s headquarters in Norway.
This is part of a joint venture called Working Group Two (WG2), which Cisco and Telenor formed in 2017, to work together on 5G, open vRAN, security, IoT and enterprise networks. It has recently secured a new round of funding of an unspecified amount. It is in the process of building a cloud-native mobile core for MNOs, MVNOs and enterprises, with open APIs to ensure interoperability.
Cisco, through its financial partner Digital Alpha, and Telenor each owns 47.5% of the venture and the remaining 5% is owned by WG2’s board and employees. WG2 sells its services directly and Cisco will now make these available through its own channels and its DevNet program. WG2 is also a technology partner in Amazon AWS’s partner network.
The additional funding will be spent on expansion in Europe, North America and Asia, and the development of new services for 5G, IoT, and private networks, the companies added.
The WG2 services are built on Cisco products but support open interfaces, Cisco says. “Our partnership in WG2 builds towards a future where programmable networks are the key to creating value for 5G, IoT, and private networks. Ongoing developments in our agreement with Cisco continue to be forward leaning, addressing the most innovative and in-demand transformation topics in our industry,” Telenor CEO Sigve Brekke said in a statement.
“We continue to evolve WG2 to give operators the opportunity to reduce time to market and speed time to revenue with IoT and managed services for the enterprise, powered by the cloud and 5G,” said Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins.
This model of a large vendor driving supposedly open platforms – with no details on how or whether they will support other specs like O-RAN or the ONF core – is a common one in telecoms. Lead operators in such ventures may sacrifice some flexibility, but they get early access to a vendor’s innovations, and a high degree of influence over how those evolve. These benefits may have attracted Telenor to WG2, though it was not an official founder member of the Open vRAN group. The only operator to join that list in 2018 was Reliance Jio, itself pursuing heavily customized 5G platforms with open interfaces, Rakuten-style (see separate item).
Open vRAN actually focuses on the end-to-end network, despite its name, and was set up to push open interfaces and frameworks that will help Cisco to integrate its virtualized core and other 5G elements with multiple vendors’ RANs, which could weaken the mobile network giants’ ability to sell end-to-end solutions around their own cores.
But Cisco is more ambitious than that. It wants to drive evolving standards for the RAN to ensure that it is fully integrated with IP networks, via open interfaces, not the semi-proprietary frameworks of the traditional cellular platform, so that the powerful positions in the network move upwards from RAN interfaces to the core.
“Our approach to 5G is holistic. It goes across IP networks, it goes across our evolved packet core, which is also tied to the network slicing architecture, and we’re actively building 5G support,” Cisco said in 2018. “Where we need to work together is to also standardize how radio access networks work, and make sure that radio devices can also sit on internet or IP networks. We have formed the open RAN ecosystem, we are going to work closely with the service providers as well as with other partners to further the disaggregation of the RAN so that it’s standards-based, it’s interoperable, and it supports the agenda for all of us, including our customers.”
The initial partners were Jio, vRAN pioneer Altiostar and a group of other vendors which are all active in open source telecoms projects – Aricent, Intel, Mavenir, Phazr, Red Hat and Tech Mahindra.