OpenRAN 101 Series

OpenRAN: Why, What, How, When

History

Some estimates put the telecom industry, especially the RAN segment, between seven and ten years behind a normal innovation curve due to the lack of competition in the market. This is a similar situation to the state of the data center industry in the 1990s, during the dot-com boom, and before companies like VMWare and Intel rapidly turned the market upside down. The data center industry – and most enterprise businesses for that matter – saw the value of a software-centric approach and transitioned to more open models, with competing software vendors fostering innovation. And now, the telecom industry is going through the same dramatic change that the data centers went through in the 2000s; all driven by Moore’s Law.

The main takeaway: In the data center world, even traditional hardware manufacturers have subsequently moved to software-centric businesses. The ones that refused to accept the software-driven world did not make it.

Why

The lack of a vibrant vendor ecosystem in telecom has limited innovation in the industry and kept the cost of network capacity high. MNOs throughout the world are aware of this and are now working with challenger vendors to address the issue and encourage change.

What

The main takeaway: Unless they embrace change, the traditional players risk becoming obsolete as the telecoms industry starts demanding networks that are open, cost-effective, and flexible.

The last 5 years saw significant moves towards the OpenRAN model, a new way of building radio networks based on a software-centric and open infrastructure, disaggregating hardware from software in the network. This helps networks support open interfaces and common development standards, to deliver multi-vendor, interoperable networks and helps avoid any vendor lock-in.

The main takeaway: Unless they embrace change, the traditional RAN vendors risk becoming obsolete as the telecoms industry starts demanding networks that are open, cost-effective, and flexible. OpenRAN is about the decoupling of hardware and software, providing more choice and interoperability. This gives operators the flexibility to cost-effectively deploy and upgrade their networks, reduce complexity, and deliver coverage at a much lower cost.

When

2016

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) was formed in early 2016 as MNOs were frustrated with a lack of innovation in a highly concentrated/closed ecosystem and high costs in the telecom equipment sector. TIP has brought together operators, traditional equipment vendors, and startups that are using open source technologies and open approaches. TIP project groups are divided into three strategic network areas that collectively make up an end-to-end wireless network: Access, Transport, and Core and Services. By dividing a network into these areas, TIP members can best identify where innovation is most needed and work to build the right products.

TIP is jointly steered by its group of founding MNOs and vendors, which form its board of directors, and is currently chaired by Vodafone's Head of Network Strategy and Architecture, Yago Tenorio. Vodafone has been leading efforts within the TIP’s OpenRAN initiative since 2016 with three main goals:

1. to spur innovation through building an ecosystem
2. to enable supplier diversity
3. to reduce deployment and maintenance costs

As part of TIP, Vodafone is working closely with other mobile operators to accelerate innovation, new technology, and business approaches to help the industry build the networks of the future.

There are over 70 mobile operator members now in the TIP membership roster. With more than 500 participating member organizations, including operators, vendors, developers, integrators, startups, and other entities that participate in various TIP project groups, TIP adopts transparency of process and collaboration in the development of new technologies. TIP supports low cost and more competition. They launched PlugFests to accelerate interoperability between vendors, to create a tangible ecosystem and to encourage trials and deployments.

2017

The first OpenRAN trials started in India and Latin America. You might wonder why low ARPU markets became a playing ground for Open RAN?

2018

February: The O-RAN Alliance was formed. It’s a worldwide, carrier-led effort to drive new levels of openness in the radio access network of next-generation wireless systems by creating standards for interoperability – one of the most important being the 7.2 functional split between RU and DU which standardized the use of 3rd party radios. The alliance was formed as a result of a merger of C-RAN Alliance and xRAN Alliance.

June: Vodafone and Telefónica announced a joint RFI to evaluate Open RAN technologies that are software-based and that run on top of commoditized hardware.

October: At TIP Summit 2018, Telefónica and Vodafone announced the vendors they chose for their Open RAN pilot deployments. Vodafone and Telefónica expressed the importance of disaggregating hardware and software to make networks open, easy, and cost-effective to deploy and maintain.

2019

February: Rakuten announces the world’s first virtualized, cloud-native greenfield 4G network. It has become a poster child for Open RAN though it doesn’t use O-RAN Alliance defined “open” interfaces.

October: At TIP Summit 2019, Telefónica cited the example of its Internet para Todos (IpT) project to showcase the benefits of Open RAN. IpT opened talks to bring a second operator on board after connecting more than 650 sites since May 2019 and covering 800,000 people (450,000 actual customers) with a 3G and 4G rollout in rural Peru.

2020

February: TIP and the Open RAN ecosystem launch an Evenstar program, which is focusing on building general-purpose RAN reference designs for 4G/5G networks in the Open RAN ecosystem that are aligned with 3GPP and O-RAN specifications.

May: OpenRAN Policy Coalition was launched. It represents a group of companies formed to promote policies that will advance the adoption of open and interoperable solutions in the RAN as a means to create innovation, spur competition, and expand the supply chain for advanced wireless technologies including 5G.

The main takeaway: Open RAN is now mainstream, with not only industry organizations joining forces to drive the OpenRAN movement forward, but also legacy vendors opening up their RAN – but for 5G only.

How

It is not a surprise that Open RAN started in rural areas, as that is the most challenging market for MNOs and vendors to address – the user penetration is low, the ARPU is low, and the site and backhaul infrastructure is non-existent. With an ALL G OpenRAN solution, MNOs can address cost and deployment challenges of rural markets globally. Minimizing CAPEX/OPEX is important in these low-density areas where there is high uncertainty regarding return on investment. High operational costs and deployment complexity of low-density deployments have prevented MNOs from bringing coverage to those areas in the past. By shifting networks to virtual Open RAN architectures, telecom operators can overcome all these problems and deliver coverage at a much lower cost.

Now that OpenRAN has been deployed and proven in those low-density areas for 5+ years, MNOs have started deploying OpenRAN in urban locations for network modernization and for 5G.