Open RAN's growing momentum has wide-reaching implications
Open RAN is becoming a bigger disruptive force, impacting not only suppliers and mobile network operators. but also enterprise users of 5G.
19 Jul 2021
Open RAN's growing momentum has wide-reaching implications
We had grown used to an impenetrable cacophony of announcements around Mobile World Congress. This year there was much less noise, due to the event only really half happening. For those of us following online, there was a noticeable stream of Open RAN headlines, and as I added them to my records, it seemed an opportune moment to recap what has happened so far in 2021 and where we are headed with Open RAN.
Put simply, Open RAN is an attempt to disaggregate radio access network (RAN) functionality, by splitting up the hardware and software thus opening up the architectures and diversifying the supply chain for the radio portion of the network. This newly created multi-supplier ecosystem uses cloud technologies, network virtualization, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, open APIs and many of the other associated calling cards of 5G/cloud era communications. At the heart of all this is an industry-wide effort to provide some interoperability standards to allow mobile network operators (MNOs) to open the door to new vendor partners, cloudify the RAN and to stimulate solution innovation for future new business opportunities by increasing competition.
There are two main collaborative groups, the O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project (TIP), working on the standards, designing and building new technologies and providing a marketplace for the community. Between them, their membership numbers every notable MNO and vendor you can think of, minus Huawei and a couple of other headline abstainers. Interestingly Ericsson and Nokia have been heavily involved from the start, even though it is their lunch that is being opened up to the new guests at the picnic, wisely choosing to hedge their bets and participate in an open ecosystem rather than ignore it and hope it goes away.
One of the latest participants in the O-RAN Alliance is Google, emphasizing the fact that RAN in the 5G era isn’t just about radio equipment, a great deal of what we’re talking about is cloud technology and AI.
Momentum seems to be gathering as actual live deployments come online. A good example is Deutsche Telekom announcing its first multivendor Open RAN in the north-eastern German town of Neubrandenburg, delivering 4G and 5G services from an initial 25 macro cell sites, including massive MIMO capabilities. The deployment is a genuine multivendor setup with equipment supplied by Dell, Fujitsu, Intel, Mavenir, NEC and Supermicro. The remote radio units are provided by Fujitsu and NEC, LTE and 5G NR kit conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with beamforming technologies. The expansion plan for the deployment will see the inclusion of a raft of other suppliers presumably working on the software ecosystem, moving the conversation towards service-level topics and what DT can supply to the businesses and consumers in the testbed town of Neubrandenburg.
Other notable Open RAN live deployments in recent months have been by TIM (Telecom Italia) and NTT DoCoMo with Vodafone in the UK also making significant investments in an Open RAN research facility in Newbury. Other Tier 1 MNOs including AT&T and Orange also specified recently that they require all of their hardware vendors to support Open RAN specifications.
The graphic below, published by TIP in October 2020, shows deployments and trials:
What is it?
Put simply, Open RAN is an attempt to disaggregate radio access network (RAN) functionality, by splitting up the hardware and software thus opening up the architectures and diversifying the supply chain for the radio portion of the network. This newly created multi-supplier ecosystem uses cloud technologies, network virtualization, artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, open APIs and many of the other associated calling cards of 5G/cloud era communications. At the heart of all this is an industry-wide effort to provide some interoperability standards to allow mobile network operators (MNOs) to open the door to new vendor partners, cloudify the RAN and to stimulate solution innovation for future new business opportunities by increasing competition.
Who is involved?
There are two main collaborative groups, the O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project (TIP), working on the standards, designing and building new technologies and providing a marketplace for the community. Between them, their membership numbers every notable MNO and vendor you can think of, minus Huawei and a couple of other headline abstainers. Interestingly Ericsson and Nokia have been heavily involved from the start, even though it is their lunch that is being opened up to the new guests at the picnic, wisely choosing to hedge their bets and participate in an open ecosystem rather than ignore it and hope it goes away.
One of the latest participants in the O-RAN Alliance is Google, emphasizing the fact that RAN in the 5G era isn’t just about radio equipment, a great deal of what we’re talking about is cloud technology and AI.
Live deployments are coming online
Momentum seems to be gathering as actual live deployments come online. A good example is Deutsche Telekom announcing its first multivendor Open RAN in the north-eastern German town of Neubrandenburg, delivering 4G and 5G services from an initial 25 macro cell sites, including massive MIMO capabilities. The deployment is a genuine multivendor setup with equipment supplied by Dell, Fujitsu, Intel, Mavenir, NEC and Supermicro. The remote radio units are provided by Fujitsu and NEC, LTE and 5G NR kit conforming to O-RAN Alliance fronthaul specifications, embedded with beamforming technologies. The expansion plan for the deployment will see the inclusion of a raft of other suppliers presumably working on the software ecosystem, moving the conversation towards service-level topics and what DT can supply to the businesses and consumers in the testbed town of Neubrandenburg.
Other notable Open RAN live deployments in recent months have been by TIM (Telecom Italia) and NTT DoCoMo with Vodafone in the UK also making significant investments in an Open RAN research facility in Newbury. Other Tier 1 MNOs including AT&T and Orange also specified recently that they require all of their hardware vendors to support Open RAN specifications.
The graphic below, published by TIP in October 2020, shows deployments and trials:
So what?
The gathering pace of buy-in to the Open RAN concept has some wide-reaching implications across the industry, here are a few:
- Where is the 5G killer application? – 5G industry dialog for the last five years has included the phrase “new high-revenue service models, brought about by 5G” and yet in 2021, NSA 5G is rolling out apace and that killer application still isn’t obvious. Instead of just making the usual investments, providing the tech and hoping for the best, Open RAN feels like the kind of initiative that could stimulate a gold rush. There are so many new moving parts to SA 5G, that by the time it starts to roll out in earnest, the Open RAN ecosystem may have busily arranged them into new successful B2B models under the pressure of competition. Necessity is the mother of invention.
- Radio access is big business – We estimate the worldwide spend on RAN products to be around USD30 billion annually (not including spectrum), with a large percentage of this going to Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, Samsung and a handful of other long-established vendors. Open RAN will start to slowly but surely eat into the closed RAN revenues, and because of increased competition the overall spending by mobile network operators s will start to drop off. Open RAN spending in 2021 is probably 1% of the overall, but over the next five years, this could be easily a double-digit percentage. The redistribution of this spending will grow smaller vendors and shake up the market, which is seldom a bad thing.
- Driving cloud-native into operational architectures – opening up the RAN adds more pace to the migration of IT workloads to the cloud and forces the RAN further in line with the 5G Core and MEC and ultimately with the growing breed of cloud-native service operations systems in the OSS/BSS. If MNOs are to deliver on the promise of what network slicing can do, being as cloud native as possible is advantageous.
- New entrants – There is significant growth in the private networks space, and yet MNOs are not the typical leading main contractor, it is the traditional RAN suppliers. Disruption to existing RAN archetypes impacts this market in the 5G era as a whole host of vendors learn how to provide RAN solutions over commoditized hardware. The knock-on implications could be in 5G industrial IoT, which MNOs have identified as a major target for their growth. In Germany, for example, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS is using Open RAN for its 5G test bed, where companies can try out Industry 4.0 applications. If a single site industrial location needs a 5G IoT network with lots of cloud compute power, beyond the issue of spectrum, Open RAN extends an enterprise’s list of options for main contractors.
There are certainly lots of things going on at the moment and I expect to see some common best practices developing in the next 12 months as more speculative live rollouts happen. One thing for sure is Open RAN is becoming a bigger disruptive force than it first appeared to be in 2018.
