AT&T has issued an update of its progress converting its radio access infrastructure to Open RAN just 10 months after announcing its $14 billion five-year deal with Ericsson for that purpose. The operator claims to be on target with its ambition of 70% of its network traffic running across the open platforms by 2026.
Much was made at the time of the announcement in December 2023 that the deal appeared to flout the original Open RAN ambition of widening the supply chain to more than a handful of big vendors, with just Fujitsu also in the mix for supply of some 5G radios.
Yet, while the latter was small beer compared with Ericsson’s involvement, it represented significant progress for Fujitsu with recognition by a major tier 1 operator outside Japan. It also left the door ajar to greater multivendor involvement in AT&T RAN in the future with a token gesture in that direction.
AT&T’s main point now is that Open RAN makes it easier to deploy new services, software and applications above the interfaces. This has given air to its campaign against 6G, which it regards as a distraction for operators at a time when capabilities are advancing under 5G.
So, as AT&T Vice President of RAN Technology Robert Soni put it, the big goal now is to maintain focus on “continuous innovation and continuous delivery of new technology as opposed to putting us into a cycle of virtuous Gs.”
This comment is significant given that Soni has recently been appointed Chairman of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which reflects the interests and direction of leading telcos, especially in Europe and North America. During the recent Open RAN Global Forum, Soni opined that industry trends circling around AI, cloud-native networking and Open RAN all move in the same direction, decoupling innovation from the roughly 10-year G cycle.
“The ability to consume these new technologies, I think, is largely predicated on the ability to move to open and programmable networks,” said Soni. “That will allow us, in the future, to potentially bring other players in.”
That was AT&T’s clearest signal yet that it plans to use Ericsson as a seasoned platform to usher in Open RAN and later open that up to other vendors. As he expressed it, AT&T was adopting the “crawl, walk, run” approach of human infants.
Cloud RAN, when implemented, would allow the running, because then RAN workloads would by definition be distributed, with some functions centralized on a cloud-based platform.
Soni cited the O1 interface – arising from O-RAN standardization work – for management and control, as well as observability of the network on the workload side.
Then the O2 interface will connect the service management and orchestration (SMO) platform to the open cloud platform. There is also the R1 interface connecting third-party applications to the SMO.
These, along with growing use of network APIs, will bring opportunities to introduce new vendors both for the underlying RAN components and apps on top. Soni noted AT&T already had a request for proposals out to add a third, as yet undisclosed, Open RAN radio provider, in addition to Ericsson and Fujitsu.
Soni must have been reading Wireless Watch. As we have consistently argued, AT&T’s refrain about the Gs dissipating into smaller rounds of innovation has been in evidence since early in the 4G era. Under 5G, capabilities have emerged almost as a drip feed with every new 3GPP release.
Admittedly, 5G Advanced has been billed as a more major step forward, almost a half G, which is exactly what Huawei has called it, but even that is being delivered through two or possibly three separate 3GPP releases, starting with Release 18 this year.
It is the vendors that want to keep the 6G flame alive in the hope of reviving flagging sales under 5G as deployments in wealthier nations approached saturation. Ericsson, as AT&T’s major supplier, has been as enthusiastic about 6G as the others, but would not openly contradict a major US customer.
In a sense, Ericsson’s dominance in the US as the only supplier of RAN components in large numbers to the country’s major telcos underlines the urgency of realizing that longer term Open RAN goal of greater multivendor interoperability, which AT&T now admits it is working towards.