Vodafone Exec Says 30% of Network Will Be Open in 2030
Vodafone’s goal is for 30% of its network in Europe to be open in 2030, said Francisco Pignatelli, Vodafone head-ORAN, Tuesday at Fierce Wireless’s virtual European open radio access network conference. Other speakers said ORAN is getting more use but warned of continuing confusion over what constitutes an open network.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
To get to Vodafone’s target “you have to start deploying now,” Pignatelli said. That means working in multiple countries, “making sure that we understand very well the ecosystem of suppliers,” he said. Vodafone is working with more than 50 companies, he said: “You need to make sure you know who the best ones are, and you also need to be able to select a few of them, but not all of them, because then it becomes … too complex.”
ORAN “is really gathering momentum in the industry,” said John Baker, Mavenir senior vice president-ecosystem business development. “The biggest challenge” he sees is “the confusion, if you like, that’s been thrown out there to protect incumbent positions, protect monopoly positions.” ORAN doesn’t define how technology is used to build open interfaces, “that’s up to the vendors,” but is about open interfaces, “both horizontally and vertically, across connections between the equipment and interfaces within the equipment,” he said.
Virtualization RAN (VRAN) isn’t always the same thing as ORAN, unless it’s built to use open interfaces, Baker said. “That’s some of the confusion,” he said. “Ask the suppliers, are the interfaces open and are they interoperable?” he said. “Any single vendor that comes along and says ‘I’ve got open RAN in my solution, but it’s my solution only,’ then I don’t believe that that’s open,” he said.
ORAN has been “the major topic in the industry over the last two years,” said Appledore Research’s Robert Curran. Confusion over what ORAN is remains an issue, he agreed. ORAN isn’t a technology but “a change in how operators engage with the supplier community in general,” he said. ORAN is at the intersection of three major trends, he said: “disaggregation, as a concept; open interfaces, as a concept in all kinds of areas; and virtualization or softwarization.”
A few providers, like Vodafone, Telefonica and Rakuten Mobile, have been the “pioneers” in the field, but ORAN is now getting adoption by “the next wave of companies,” Curran said. This second wave of companies is looking to the early adopters for “proof points,” he said: “I don’t think there’s really serious technical discussion that open RAN in some sense doesn’t work” though parts need to mature. Another challenge is that ORAN providers are trying to develop in five years what it took industry 30 years to build, he said. “The tendency is to think that open RAN is just the next kind of RAN, and it really isn’t; it’s a lot more than that,” he said.
Adrian Hazon, Nokia vice president-global product sales, said the business case for ORAN “is not yet proven” for new networks or to replace old equipment. ORAN “does give an opportunity for competition, for innovation, for leadership, provoking the industry to think how to perform better,” he said: “It really doesn’t have too much chance on boosting competition and lowering cost.”
Working with multiple vendors can be more expensive than using a more traditional, proprietary network, Hazon said. “We need to be much more cognizant of power consumption, versus performance, versus costs, and at that moment the best solutions for that are probably not a fully open … network,” he said. Some think ORAN equals cheaper or better performance, but neither is necessarily true, he said: “It does equal vendor diversity, perhaps, it does equal opportunity to mix and match across the networks, but it all has to be against the backdrop that there could be a compromise in terms of performance,” he said. “There is a place for [ORAN], but it’s just finding the right place.”