It is rare for a month to go by without a collection of new developments related to Open RAN, and April has been no exception. European operators continued to put weight behind an open platform, with Orange joining fellow heavyweights Vodafone and Telefónica in a pledge to deploy only Open RAN-compatible equipment from 2025.
The UK government also offered support for Open RAN, following a study of 5G security and supply chain diversity issues, but missed some of the point by recommending buying quotas for the country’s four MNOs. Nokia expanded on its proposition to seize a good share of this market, but its challengers are on the move too, with Mavenir announcing new funding. And the USA’s Dish Network made history by announcing the first nationwide macro RAN that will be deployed in the public cloud, via a partnership with AWS (see separate item).
Orange’s CTIO, Michael Trabbia, in a presentation about the company’s network modernization plans, was careful to stress that ‘open’ may not mean ‘new vendor’ or even ‘multivendor’. “Open RAN will be important to have more agility and more automation in the network, but the objective is certainly not to attack our existing providers,” he said.
He said Orange was keen to encourage a strong European Open RAN ecosystem, and of course, Nokia and Ericsson would be expected to be anchors of that ecosystem. So far, Nokia has risen enthusiastically to the challenge, while Ericsson, though an active member of the O-RAN Alliance, has not announced any commercial plans.
Trabbia said that Orange was currently conducting a trial of a fully virtualized and automated RAN, which should be fit to host customers by the end of this year, and will provide a proof point for wider deployments in the coming years. The roadmap for open vRAN will be drawn up in parallel with that for migration to 5G Standalone which will begin at scale in 2023, and an AI-driven network automation program.
Orange is part of a group of five European operators which signed a memorandum of understanding last month to support Open RAN and help enable a European ecosystem. The others are Vodafone and Telefónica, both of which plan to deploy macro Open RANs in the mid-2020s and are very active in the Telecom Infra Project; Deutsche Telekom and Telecom Italia.
One of the big challenges for the whole community is to develop processor and software platforms that can deliver the same performance as integrated solutions, in large-scale 5G networks supporting demanding levels of real time functionality. Tommi Uitto, head of Nokia’s networks business, agrees that vRAN and Open RAN are not competitive today in capex, opex, power consumption or performancec, but believes they will catch up in all these respects in a few years’ time. “We know from overall technology development that the day will come when it is mature and it is competitive against bare metal,” he said.
He said it was important to Nokia to be part of that process rather than sitting outside so “we can also make sure that our system-on-chip (SoC) and our platforms are O-RAN compliant, and that we also have the right solutions for vRAN.” When Nokia launched its most recent vRAN portfolio, it announced that Open RAN interface compliance was an option in all the products.
Uitto said that currently, open RAN baseband suppliers have to run on x86-based hardware which is not cost- or power-efficient, and requires hardware acceleration. But he does not believe that these general purpose chip platforms necessarily have to catch up completely with custom silicon. Instead, he told SDXCentral, even if there are capex weaknesses in Layer 1, “it could be that the overall benefits of cloud computing and the decentralized network architecture with Open RAN … and the overall benefits of automation, could actually outweigh the capex deficiency if you just look at the Layer 1 processing piece.”
Another key challenge, he acknowledge, is that “when we disaggregate the base station, we actually have to re-aggregate it somehow to ensure not just interoperability, but the right network performance, network operating concepts, and also lifecycle management from release upgrades to support policies”.
Operators and their suppliers understand that mobile networks are complex beasts and a major transformation of the architecture and ecosystem is likely to take years to complete. Governments do not necessarily understand this, and there have been plenty of unrealistic ‘goals’ set by politicians for rapid deployment of open networks, preferably using vendors from their own country, whether that is the USA or India.
Several European governments, such as those of Germany and the UK, have said they will encourage or incentivize broader 5G ecosystems, which is a welcome approach. Less welcome is any attempt to impose quotas, as the UK appears to be doing. Its Telecoms Diversification Taskforce, led by former BT CEO Ian Livingston, published its initial report last week and its recommendations include one that operators should buy at least 25% of their network equipment from new suppliers by the mid-2020s.
The report says: “The Government should set out a clear ambition for the deployment of equipment from alternative suppliers, or from Open RAN solutions, to a meaningful proportion of the network – and clarify its intent to ensure these alternative suppliers should form an integral part of the UK’s urban networks in the longer term. We recommend the Government sets a challenging ambition to work toward a significant portion of equipment within mobile operators’ networks being supplied by new suppliers and/or through open architectures. The Taskforce believes 25% by the mid-2020s should be the initial aspiration for mobile operators.
Government quotas in telecoms rarely have happy results – repeated attempts by Indian administrations, for instance, to make operators procure a minimum percentage of equipment from local vendors have fallen foul of the shortage of suppliers available. The UK initiative is focused on encouraging more vendors to compensate for the exclusion of Huawei and ZTE, but there is little point in mandating new vendors if they do not have the products that the operators need – and if they do, the operators are extremely motivated to procure more widely than Ericsson and Nokia anyway.
But the fact remains, operators may deploy Open RAN and still choose an ‘old’ supplier such as Nokia, while avoiding lock-in because of the open architecture. That point has been somewhat missed in the UK’s report because of the focus on geopolitics rather than actual 5G network requirements.
In a paper by the London School of Economics, Jean-Christophe Plantin wrote: “Openness is an ambiguous notion that can be used by governments to exclude foreign trade enemies while advocating for trust in telecommunications networks”, but he argued that this is not an effective way to open up a freer market or improve network security.
Neil McRae, BT’s chief network architect, recently said he wanted to reduce the number of suppliers BT deals with, telling a recent TelecomTV event: “Complexity is the killer in telcos. We struggle to deal with it. When I hear about these open architectures where there are 50 different vendors, or even five, involved, I run for the hills because frankly we’re not geared to operate like that.”
The UK report also proposes that the government should work to “attract the entry” of at least one “scale” vendor that is not a current significant supplier to the four operators. NEC is the prime candidate here as it has already held talks with the government, and invested in open networking labs.
Two of the UK’s four operators, Vodafone and Telefónica O2, are in the vanguard of support for Open RAN, and will not need government quotas to increase their interest. But they also acknowledge there is work to be done to get the new solutions up to scratch for at-scale deployment, and Vodafone is doing its bit by setting up an Open RAN test and integration lab in its Newbury headquarters west of London. About 30 engineers will work with prospective vendor partners in the lab and will provide feedback on their solutions. Vodafone plans to deploy Open RAN at 2,500 siets in rural areas, initially, between 2022 and 2027.
“The Open RAN ecosystem is still in its infancy, and we want to spur its development,” said Andrea Dona, Vodafone UK’s chief network officer. “We want to avoid a Catch-22 situation, where operators wait to buy perfect products, but the Open RAN vendors need investment to perfect their products.”
Also setting up an Open RAN lab in the UK is Mavenir, which already has a UK engineering base courtesy of its acquisition of Cambridge-based IP.access, but will now also open a Open RAN development center in Swindon in western England.
Mavenir also announced a new investor, with Koch Strategic Platforms paying $500m for a minority stake of undisclosed size. Mavenir’s current owner, Siris Capital Group, retains the majority stake. Koch is an active investor in four sectors – computing and connectivity, industrial automation, energy transformation and healthcare and Mavenir’s CEO, Pardeep Kohli, said this will help the company target 5G solutions at these vertical industries.