Sentiment Behind Open Networks Cooling but Not Going Away

Some early ORAN “champions” are “proceeding at a much slower rate than we expected,” Joiner said, while some vendors, including Mavenir, have pulled out of parts of the ORAN market. Only about 30 carriers have launched public open network deployments worldwide, he noted. “It’s still a relatively small share of the overall network.” However, a few carriers are using ORAN for new deployments, and some larger, established players, including AT&T and NTT Docomo in Japan, have started to deploy, he said.

The early deployments involve one central vendor, Joiner said. “We’re still really waiting for this sort of true multi-vendor open RAN deployment to take off.” To make a multi-vendor solution work, carriers need to do a lot of testing and coordination and “have the right systems integration partners,” he said. Many of the challenges “will decrease over time,” and there will start to be more ORAN deployments, he predicted. For the next few years, ORAN will mostly be deployed in “specific scenarios,” including indoor systems and private wireless networks, he said. “Traditional RAN will still be the dominant deployment model,” though 6G offers providers “a chance to rethink network architectures.”

Kristian Toivo, executive director of the Telecom Infra Project, said the sentiment at the group's conference last week was that “openness is here to stay,” and while AI is “overhyped,” it's “slowly but surely” having an impact on network architecture. Openness and AI “fit very well together” and “almost are interdependent.”

“We know what we’re doing in the industry,” and “we have a lot to do,” Toivo said. “We’ve shown that open systems and solutions are the way to go.” But change takes time, and many carriers have legacy networks they must work with, he said. The telecom industry also isn’t really growing at this point, “which means it’s not easy to place bets that would require significant upfront investments.” Toivo added that carriers including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and NTT Docomo are leading the way on large-scale ORAN deployments.

New developments like ORAN “always get very hyped at the start of the wave,” said Geoff Hollingworth, chief marketing officer at solutions provider Rakuten Symphony. The hype tends to disappear “and the energy seems to go elsewhere,” while work continues behind the scenes, he said. “The important thing to understand about openness is: Why is it important, and what are we trying to achieve, not only in open RAN, but across the whole network?”

Providers have to take responsibility for the system design inside their networks, Hollingworth said. The “brutal truth” is that standards define 20-30% of what goes into a network, he said. The rest is “bespoke across all our different networks,” and “you have to design what you want your network to look like.” The most important consideration is developing the ability to manage all the different parts using “one unified operational control,” he added. The biggest reason for opening networks is allowing them to be automated in order to move management “out of the hands of people and into a software program.”

Maite Aparicio, Telefonica's ORAN and RAN innovation manager, said the Spanish provider is working with new market entrants on multi-vendor ORAN. It has backed off a proposal to use ORAN in half its network this year because it needs time to “ensure interoperability,” she said. But the carrier remains committed to ORAN and continues to work with vendors, she added. “At the end, it’s not a matter of a diverse ecosystem, it’s a matter of having open interfaces.”