While the five major operators put their feet on the Open RAN accelerator in Europe, parties in other regions also want to speed up the progress of bringing a fully mature, interoperable Open RAN platform to market. In the USA, major vendors are calling on the government to put money behind its support for a US-centric 5G industry by supporting the creation of more Open RAN testing and certification facilities.
In particular, companies like Microsoft and Intel want a certification programme, somewhat like the one established for the CBRS spectrum, that will be funded and endorsed by the USA. This would help stimulate a US-centric ecosystem and if it were adopted globally, could greatly enhance the USA’s position of influence in the global 5G world. However, it was not only supported by homegrown companies, but also by Ericsson, which is both European and ambivalent towards Open RAN.
Some US politicians have been vocal – and often rather uninformed – in support of creating a homegrown 5G industry around Open RAN, a bid that has got tied up with America-first and anti-Chinese sentiments and the exclusion of Huawei from even the small MNOs’ networks. However, only fairly small funds have been placed at the disposal of Open RAN efforts.
The FCC’s acting chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, has offered supportive words – in February she said: “Open RAN has emerged as one promising path to drive 5G security and innovation in the United States. It could revitalize the nation’s 5G leadership and innovation.” But few concrete actions have followed so far.
The FCC did recently hold a proceeding to discuss how it could work with other policy makers to encourage the development of US Open RAN technology and suppliers. This produced responses from many vendors that want to spur the government and regulator into action, with a certification programme emerging as a popular focus for investment.
“An industry certification program for Open RAN can be a significant milestone, where every component provider gets certified,” Microsoft said. “It is extremely important to recognize that setting up this process should not delay or hinder the aggressive momentum seen with Open RAN. As a model, the industry has developed a certification process for devices in the CBRS band known as OnGo certification. The FCC should encourage industry to come up with the equivalent for Open RAN.”
Ericsson – which has not yet announced Open RAN-compliant products – nevertheless had a view on testing, and proposed that the Department of Defense should set up a lab “to which all vendors could bring their products for functional and interoperability testing”.
The DoD is already working with the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on a 5G Challenge initiative, which says aims to “ensure cooperation, collaboration and interoperability among the participants” in the pursuit of “an open 5G ecosystem that can support DoD missions”. That remit could be expanded to cover broader commercial operator objectives while providing specific Open RAN processes, some companies argue.
In its own filings with the FCC, Intel wrote: “The US ecosystem has few RAN hardware and virtual network function (VNF) software vendors especially for macrocell solutions. These are important areas for the Open RAN ecosystem which should be considered in efforts to expand the ecosystem.” Intel, of course, has high hopes of providing the default processor platform on which future cloud-based RANs will run, and has established leadership with its FlexRAN architecture. But solutions coming from the ARM-based community and from the hyperscalers could blight its hopes.
Intel also had ideas for new testing facilities, suggesting that Congress could fund an Open Testing and Integration Center (OTIC) for Open RAN based on the framework already defined for OTICs by the O-RAN Alliance. So far, there is no OTIC in the USA, and Intel believes “North America would benefit from an OTIC, which could facilitate and accelerate adoption of Open RAN by certifying the most common tests required by operators. The presence of an OTIC in North America would likely be particularly helpful for smaller companies.”
Some ecosystem players will be suspicious of a certification programme that is too tightly controlled by government, rather than commercial operators.
They may also resist one that is entirely tied to O-RAN Alliance specifications, when many MNOs aim to support a mixture of platforms from different organizations, according to scenario. At last week’s Small Cell World Summit conference, for instance, BT talked about the need to support more than one functional split between radio units and virtualized basebands in a disaggregated RAN. In enterprise and small cell scenarios, the operator favors Small Cell Forum’s nFAPI, based on 3GPP Split 6, as it does not require the extremely high quality fiber that is needed for Split 7.2, on which O-RAN bases its Open Fronthaul interface.
And many believe that testing and certification will be better managed by the open alliances themselves, or by operator-driven labs like those seen in Europe. The O-RAN Alliance has run several plugfests, the first in China, and two US-based events that have included a testing element. These were held in New York City in late 2019, hosted by AT&T, and in New York and Salt Lake City in late 2020, hosted by AT&T and Verizon. Both of these plugfests operated via the US government-funded programme, Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR).