Special Report: New RAN models
The main topics of debate around Open RAN focus on architectural challenges, and on the impact on the supply chain. Clearly, a genuinely open and virtualized network platform has the potential to broaden the ecosystem, lower barriers to new entrants, and allow deployers to mix and match their networks from a broad base of innovators.
However, there are other potential and significant impacts of Open RAN on the mobile telecoms business model. It is not just the vendor and components ecosystems that could be disrupted if the new platforms become widely adopted. They will also enable, or accelerate, transformation of the operator business models, as well as changing the patterns of ownership and deployment of network assets.
A virtualized, multivendor RAN will be able to support new, and more flexible, approaches to network sharing, for instance. While the sharing of passive infrastructure, such as towers, is commonplace between operators, active RAN sharing is more unusual. This is sometimes for regulatory reasons, but often because it is technically and commercially complicated to achieve the efficiencies of shared networks without sacrificing an operator’s control of coverage or quality of service, and therefore its differentiation; or its choice of vendors and technologies.
In a virtualized environment, each operator could deploy its own choice of physical cell site equipment while sharing the basebands and underlying cloud infrastructure; or they could build a fully common network and then slice it from the core. A neutral host could build and own the cloud-based shared network, allocating resources to tenant MNOs on a far more flexible basis than current architectures allow. There would be regulatory changes to be made, but flexible and dynamic resource sharing will be essential to enhance the total cost of ownership model in the future, and is likely to be fundamental to 6G.
Our report this week highlights some other key changes enabled by open, virtualized networks as these mature towards the second half of the decade – with some tangible steps already being taken.
One of the most important changes in the model will be driven by network-as-a-service. This is already a feature of a few operators’ fixed-line enterprise offerings and now, companies are starting to develop subscription-based propositions for private and enterprise networks, with Federated Wireless the latest to join the market. Some of the mechanisms are driven by extension of existing WiFi-as-a-service models, from companies like Cisco, into cellular and multi-access environments.
The ability to match different services to the needs of the client on a flexible basis will depend on open platforms and spectrum, and over time, these models will expand into public networks in a dynamic evolution of the MVNO model, that puts far more control into the hands of the tenant operator than current static capacity leasing norms.
All this depends not just on open networks but on the cloud. But it will not be enough for networks to migrate gradually to vRAN platforms. An open set of standards for the underlying edge cloud will also be essential to avoid siloes, which could fragment the 5G platform not at radio level but in the telco cloud.
As networks open up, enabling new service providers and new ownership models, they will also potentially become more complex to deploy. As vRAN and Open RAN mature, the provisioning of network functions could become relatively automated from the cloud, but there will still be increasingly diverse and mission-critical physical elements to deploy and optimize, from antennas to small cells to components.
Large operators may integrate their networks themselves, or partner with tier 1 vendors or global system integrators like Accenture. But in the private and enterprise wireless fields, where so much of the early Open RAN adoption and growth will be found, a new breed of SI will be required, able to deploy networks cost-effectively for companies that do not have significant internal 5G knowledge, and do not necessarily have budgets for a tier 1 SI.
Whether value-added resellers expand their SI skills to target this opportunity, or more automated, plug-and-play systems eventually emerge, the private RAN ecosystem could look very different from that of the public networks, and drive new business opportunities for service providers and for suppliers.