In the early days of any significant move towards new open platforms, a key challenge is to balance the desire for a broad innovation base, with the need to achieve unified and operationally robust platforms in time to meet market deployment needs. Large players will push for breadth and openness of the platform to maximize participation, competition and new ideas; but also for a controlled and unified architecture that can achieve large scale quickly. In some cases the players supporting these objectives may have competing commercial agendas; in others they may be the same companies, seeking to strike the perfect balance between breadth and unity.
The IT world went through this process of aligning different objectives, in the long migration to Unix and Linux and then the cloud. Many of the lessons from that sector’s journey can be learned and modified for the rather different world of telecoms networks, and especially for the particularly challenging migration from closed RAN architectures to the Open RAN.
Developments in this month alone highlight the different trends in Open RAN. Large players, from chip giants, to network equipment providers (NEPs), to IT giants are all seeking to identify their optimal place in the emerging value chain, to leverage existing strengths and bid for a controlling role.
The final shape of the ecosystem will depend to a significant extent on their eventual success or failure. Nokia and Samsung, of course, are the biggest NEPs that are making a big bet on Open RAN, and there is a scenario in which they use their 5G position to drive scale into the new platform, but at the expense of raising barriers to entry for smaller challengers because they dominate Open RAN contracts.
One of the most important factors that could ensure a broad selection of vendors, large and small, is a unified semiconductor platform on which a wide variety of suppliers can innovate at relatively low cost, harnessing common foundations plus open interfaces to be part of the supply chain. The biggest example of this from the past, of course, is the PC industry, in which processors and many interfaces were common, allowing many hardware vendors to enter the market. The big difference, though, is that the PC also had a single operating system for many years, and in open telecoms, the network operating system (NOS) and the RAN controller (RIC) will also be critical points of influence. Large vendors and operators are racing to shape these key open specifications, as seen in Nokia’s high level of activity in the RIC, or AT&T’s in the NOS.
While a lot of interest focuses on the RAN, the progress in white box switches and routers, with their associated chips (led by Broadcom) and NOS, provide many useful lessons for the 5G ecosystem. Organizations like Telecom Infra Project (TIP) are instrumental in driving Open RAN platforms that live within an end-to-end network context, with architectures that extend into xHaul and transport, and into non-3GPP access such as WiFi or fixed broadband. TIP’s work on the disaggregated cell site gateway (DCSG) is particularly notable in driving openness forward in a segment that may reach market maturity more quickly than the 5G macro RAN, but will also provide valuable learnings for the RAN. Vodafone Romania is the latest operator to announce a DCSG trial (see below).
The large operators aspire to a platform that derives its scale not from a few large NEPs but from their own collective power to shape platforms and procure equipment. Several operators are building their own ecosystems with this scale in mind, though some of these remain, at this stage, localized to the MNO – for instance, AT&T, Verizon, NTT Docomo and China Mobile. It will be important for these various operator initiatives to support new platforms and supply chains in a unified way, to avoid fragmentation. So far, of course, Rakuten has been the most active in seeking to create a platform that all operators can support, and that can reduce time to deployment for smaller MNOs that cannot build their own inhouse ecosystems and architectures. Last week, Etisalat became the latest operator to join the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP) initiative (see below).
RCP, which also has support from Telefónica and STC, epitomises the need to balance openness with a unifying hand – without that hand turning into excessive control by one company or small clique. Some fear that RCP, or O-RAN, may become over-prescriptive in a 5G world in which operators need the most flexible architecture possible, to enable different functional splits, for instance. Others fear that open networks lead to fragmented markets for vendors and high complexity for deployers. Past experience in the IT and other industries shows that a workable balance can be struck, and there is significant will across the mobile networks industry to ensure that happens in Open RAN.
But striking this balance does remain one of the biggest challenges as the market evolves rapidly during the course of 2021. And there is not the luxury of time. Some operators want to deploy commercial Open RAN, at least in new or small networks, this year and major players are looking at 2025 as a timescale for wide-scale macro network roll-out. So in parallel with defining the value chain, there will be intensive work – as demonstrated last week by Rakuten and Altiostar (see below) – in making sure that any emerging Open RAN technologies can perform to the same level as a traditional solution.