Amid Move to ORAN, Operators Seek Outside Help
Network operators are looking for other companies to act as system integrators (SIs) as open radio access networks roll out, Charlie Martin, Dell Technologies senior consultant-open RAN product management, said during an RCR Wireless webinar Tuesday. Other speakers predicted a gradual move to ORAN, with parts already underway.
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Dell is “working on plans” to be an SI based on market demand, Martin said. “We’re working with RAN vendors and cloud-software vendors and core-network vendors to get their software into our labs so that we can train ourselves up,” he said. Integrators need a strong testing program, he said. Operators can play the role of SI, but often are choosing to seek outside help, he said. “We’ve been asked to do this,” he said.
Networks will see changes regardless of when they adopt ORAN architecture, said Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director-RAN engineering. “We will be introducing new technologies and new architectures into the existing network,” he said. “We need to look at that first.” In the next two to three years networks will get more centralization and hubbing and more functional separation of RAN hardware, he said. There will be more virtualization of centralized units, he said.
In-building and private networks will have multi-access edge computing and other changes that could boost the use of ORAN, Akkaya said. ORAN could be a “game changer” for security and latency for those networks, he said.
German operator 1&1 is launching what will be the largest greenfield ORAN in Europe, said Anil Bhandari, vice president-product management at Rakuten’s Altiostar. “There’s a lot of emphasis on automation, including use cases like self-healing and automatic deployment,” he said. “We will be deploying advanced capabilities” including massive multi-input, multi-output units.
ORAN “requires a change of mindset,” Bhandari said. Hardware and software have a role to play, but it’s the software that will “bring rapid innovation in terms of feature delivery and also simplification of network operations through programmability,” he said: “Once this aspect is clear, everyone in the organization can be aligned.” Operators will become more involved in the design and architecture of their networks “and we’re already seeing this,” he said. This makes it easier to differentiate a network from competitors, he said.
European carrier Orange’s goal is to make all network equipment ORAN compliant by 2025 “because it’s really the technology of choice,” said Arnaud Vamparys, senior vice president-seamless wireless access.
Dell's Martin said the move to disaggregation isn’t new and has been underway in some form for 20 years. “When I was at Nortel we had one big chassis that had everything,” he said: “It was the radio and the baseband function. … The first stage of disaggregation was separating the baseband unit from the radio head.” Now we’re disaggregating the baseband, he said.
Martin said the move to ORAN was inevitable because of industry consolidation. There used to be seven big vendors outside of China, which shrunk to two -- Ericsson and Nokia, he said. “The ecosystem is just too small and that causes all kinds of issues to the operator in terms of lack of choice, lack of control, restricted deployment models, slow time to market for new services,” he said. Even operators happy with their vendors see the need for open networks, he said.