MWC announcements point to shake up of radio access network market

The future of the radio access network (RAN), whether open or with a combination of AI, was a hot topic at MWC, with announcements including the launch of a new AI RAN alliance. The world’s telecom operators, however, are approaching RAN’s future from very different starting points, which undoubtedly will result in them making very different choices.

In the US, for example, three players dominate a country of more than 340 million inhabitants. By contrast in the European Union several telcos compete within each of its 27 markets that together are home to just under 450 million people.

The structure of the European market, however, looks set to change, with an ongoing consultation by the European Commission (EC) pointing to future consolidation and infrastructure sharing, which a new EC whitepaper outlines. As a result, Europe’s operators have to consider network interoperability, infrastructure sharing and a whole lot of uncertainty when weighing up RAN options in a way that their US counterparts do not.

All together now

The need to create market scale in Europe through consolidation was alluded to in a speech on the opening day of MWC by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market.

Breton’s vision is that “core network operators will be able to offer their services seamlessly across the whole single market, take advantage of economies of scale, reach critical size, and ultimately attract more investment and deploy new technologies faster. And thanks to this principle we will finally create a true digital single market and a compelling business case for operators to engage in cross-border consolidation.”

He added: “It also means demystifying the question of the optimal number of operators because no, there is no magic number in this field.”

And indeed, consolidation is already happening. During MWC, for example, Swisscom announced plans to buy Vodafone’s Italian subsidiary for €8 billion and merge it with its Italian Fastweb operations.

Breton sees the evolution of software-centric, cloud-native networks and open architectures as another factor driving regulatory change. Certainly, the availability of interoperable, software-based network components would ease the integration difficulties of bringing together pan-European assets.

Ajar, not open

Not that Open RAN necessarily offers a guarantee of openness today. In a recent Light Reading article, for example, a Microsoft executive called into question the maturity of the Open RAN market.

"We are very pro O-RAN. All the investment we are doing for AI in the RAN is all O-RAN-centric, and you'll see that with the Janus project we're announcing,” said Yousef Khalidi, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Azure for Operators business, according to Light Reading. “But the point is, if you want to buy an O-RAN stack now and deploy it at scale, frankly, I don't see it out there yet. The option out there today is at best a virtual RAN solution from a handful of suppliers. The industry has not moved fast enough on the O-RAN side, unfortunately."

Such doubts haven’t stopped US operators making sizeable investments in Open RAN without too much concern for vendor diversity. In December AT&T selected Ericsson to help it move up to 70% of its wireless traffic to an Open RAN network architecture by 2026 in an agreement on which it could spend up to $14 billion over five years. Verizon, meanwhile, said it has deployed 130,000 O-RAN capable radios. According to Light Reading, its O-RAN-compatible radios have been supplied by Samsung and Ericsson.

Europe’s smaller steps

In contrast, European Open RAN deployments are much more tentative, despite vocal support for the technology.

Vodafone Group, one of the region’s loudest Open RAN advocates, has announced a smattering of trials and smaller commercial deployments. In Italy, for example, it is working with Nokia on an Open RAN trial in association with RedHat and Dell. In the UK it is working with Dell, Intel, Samsung, Wind River and Capgemini on Open RAN deployments in Devon and Wales.

Vodafone also announced an Open RAN agreement with NTT Docomo to cooperate on harmonizing system integration and test processes among mobile operators, and teamed up with Orange to trial 4G calling over a shared Open RAN infrastructure, again with Samsung, Dell and WindRiver,

Indeed, Orange sees infrastructure sharing as one of the important features of Open RAN.

“Open RAN offers a new way to share active equipment (radio units and servers) without necessarily sharing the software,” Atoosa Hatefi, who is responsible for the Radio Innovation Department at Orange, told Inform via email. “This enables good cost savings, while increasing the capabilities to differentiate. So, yes, RAN sharing is likely to be a key feature characterizing the roll-out of Open RAN.”

But even more importantly, “Open RAN is a central part of our digital transformation to become a software-centric telco by 2030,” stated Hatefi. “As we master automation, disaggregation, cloud, and AI & Data – each of these elements will support and facilitate the introduction of Open RAN.”

One of the potential payoffs of software centricity is making programmable, cloud-native RAN available to developers, as AT&T spelled out in its announcement of its first Cloud RAN call, which is part of its wider Open RAN strategy. “Moving to Cloud RAN enables AT&T to deliver and secure data in the most cost-effective way possible while also creating an open environment for developers to create new apps and services,” the company stated.

Vendors line up for a slice of the future

In the meantime, vendors are building alliances in the hope of becoming major players in whatever shape a future disaggregated, cloud-native and software-centric RAN infrastructure might take.

Nvidia and Softbank, for example, led the announcement of an AI RAN Alliance, whose members also include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Arm, DeepSig, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Northeastern University, Samsung Electronics and T-Mobile. The alliance is covering several bases by working on:

• AI for RAN, which aims to improve the performance and efficiency of radio access networks
• AI and RAN, which integrates AI and RAN processes on the same underlying infrastructure,
• AI on RAN to develop and deploy AI-enabled applications at the edge of the network

NTT Docomo meanwhile focused on the system integration demands of Open RAN by announcing a joint venture with NEC to sell and maintain Open RAN equipment and services.

The joint venture, called OREX SAI, will build on DOCOMO’s experience of launching what it calls the world’s first nationwide Open RAN 5G service in Japan in March 2020, as well as OREX, which it launched in 2023 in a bid to become an Open RAN service provider for international telecom operators.