-
AT&T and Verizon pledged their souls to Open RAN this week
-
President Biden is running on the idea that open RAN will serve as a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE.
-
The dream of a truly multi-vendor open RAN appears to be mostly just a fantasy
AT&T and Verizon may have vowed to put their heart and soul into Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) technology this week, but it’s not the same all-singing, all-singing experience some commentators had hoped for the standard. It may not be a dancing, multi-vendor love fest.
In response, the U.S. government committed $42 million to accelerate the development of the 5G Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), cementing the future of the specification with the aforementioned major carriers.
The National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) will fund the project by a consortium of U.S. and foreign carriers, equipment vendors, and academics to establish a research and development center in Dallas.
The goal is to establish standards to replace Chinese giant Huawei, the world’s number one vendor.
In fact, President Biden is running on the idea that open RAN will serve as a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE. According to the Washington Post, he mentioned Open RAN to several world leaders.
Of course, for open RAN to be a viable global alternative, it needs to be cheap, reliable, and available. Therefore, the government worked with domestic and “friendly” foreign carriers and vendors to establish this technology. A side effect of this strategy, the post says, is that U.S. vendors could get back into the pure RAN game, at least that’s the hope.
Cisco are you listening?
So what is Open RAN?
Open RAN generally refers to an architecture with disaggregated components. Remote radio heads and baseband units (BBUs) are divided into centralized units (CUs), distributed units (DUs), and radio units (RUs).
DUs are connected to RUs through fronthaul connections, and CUs are connected to DUs through midhaul links. The CU is then connected to the mobile core via backhaul. Open RAN requires that the interfaces between CUs, DUs, and RUs be agreed upon and openly defined, allowing the exchange of his CUs, DUs, and RUs from different vendors.
Learn more about how Open RAN works here.
Open RAN allows carriers to more easily mix and match cellular software and hardware, opening the market to smaller equipment vendors and allowing carriers to mix and match equipment from different vendors. They can be used in combination.
Single vendor or multiple vendors? That’s the question.
After AT&T and Verizon announced their open RAN plans. But those carriers only used one vendor (Ericsson for AT&T) or two (Ericsson and Samsung for Verizon), making the dream of a true multi-vendor open RAN largely a mere It seems like it’s just a fantasy.
Deutsche Telekom has “multi-vendor” agreements with Nokia and Fujitsu, and is just beginning to roll out open RAN to break with Huawei’s long-standing habits. “They want Open RAN to be more than just a new interface and also support multi-vendor RAN and virtualized RAN, so it will take some time for the economics to be understood.” Stephan Pongratz, his RAN analyst at Dell’Oro Group, told his Silverlinings. last year.
Smaller greenfield 5G operators like Dish in the US may have chosen the multi-vendor route. As EJL Wireless founder Earl Lum recently stated, it’s unrealistic to expect him to use five wireless vendors just because Verizon is introducing open RAN equipment. . The same is true (mostly) for many large carriers. No one wants to deal with a large number of equipment vendors.
Open RAN may therefore, in reality, be primarily a Scandinavian telecom mafia game after all. However, it can be said that through the provision of virtualized RAN, Samsung has definitely strengthened its position as a RAN vendor.
For coverage of Mobile World Congress 2024, check out our dedicated channel here.
