ORAN Having Growth Starting with Open Network Fronthaul, Experts Say
Open fronthaul, a telecom concept that started with 4G, is becoming key as carriers launch 5G, speakers said during a Light Reading open radio access network virtual seminar Tuesday. Questions remain about ORAN, and when it will launch at scale (see 2209070052), but experts said growth is undeniable. The fronthaul is the connection between the baseband unit and the remote radio head, which became more important under LTE networks as operators moved their radios closer to the antennas.
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“We’re in the middle of a really big 5G investment cycle,” with the RAN market growing from $33 billion in 2018 to $47 billion last year, and 2022 expected to be equally strong, said Gabriel Brown, Heavy Reading senior principal analyst-mobile networks and 5G. Spending in China is tapering off, but the U.S. is expected to make about 20% of global RAN expenditures this year, he said. Japan and parts of Europe are also leaders, he said.
On some levels the ORAN ecosystem is “actually flourishing,” Brown said: “It’s created a much more diverse and dynamic marketplace. It’s injected some energy and fresh thinking into RAN. … It’s offered good opportunities for small and large players.” The biggest contribution could be “bringing a cloud-first mindset” to the RAN world, he said: “We also need to be a little realistic -- open RAN isn’t fully competitive yet with some of the state-of-art integrated systems.”
The RAN market will “stay strong for quite a long period,” Brown predicted. ORAN is “growing fast,” likely to be about 16% of network investments in 2026, he said: “It could go a lot higher.” Brown noted Verizon is targeting C-band deployment on 20,000 cellsites by 2025: “It wouldn’t surprise me to see Verizon bring in open-packet fronthaul.”
NTT Docomo deployed 5G throughout Japan, using more than 20,000 base stations, all with open fronthaul, said Anil Umesh, NTT manager-RAN development department. “It’s really full-scale, multivendor open RAN, which we are deploying for our 5G,” he said.
For NTT Docomo, open fronthaul is “really about flexibility,” Umesh said. “There are many radios, which we need to deploy, and many different deployment scenarios,” he said: “It could be different bands, it could be different types of cells. We would like to select the best product.” The carrier has been “keen” on being able to choose among vendors since before it started to launch 5G, he said. The biggest vendors are starting to provide open fronthaul as “something they cannot ignore,” he said: “It takes time. But including big and small [vendors], the work is happening.”
Still Maturing
The ORAN market is still “maturing,” said Femi Adeyemi, Fujitsu head-wireless business. The focus is on massive multiple-input and multiple-output, he said. There still aren’t enough buyers of ORAN radios, “we’re looking for more, but we see a lot of opportunities,” he said: “The interest is growing. … There are hurdles, but we are overcoming them to ensure we bring a lot of buyers into the ecosystem.”
Adeyami said the U.S. market for open fronthaul radios is growing. The problem worldwide is getting scale, he said: “You find fragmented spectrum. You find low numbers of radios being required.” To “operators that are not looking at open RAN today, please do,” he said.
The ORAN market will “support tens of radio suppliers, purely because of the numbers of frequency bands, the types of radios,” said John Baker, Mavenir senior vice president-ecosystem business development. “There’s plenty of opportunity,” he said. Mavenir has focused on building radios it couldn’t get through third-party suppliers, he said. “We are at the early stages” for ORAN, he said: Building scale is “important to really make [ORAN] happen.”
Initially everyone was focused on the “macro space” for ORAN, said Kevin Smith, RAN team lead at Germany’s Kontron, which offers embedded computer modules, boards and systems. “We’re seeing a lot of interest in more nontraditional applications” including warehouse and factory automation, he said. Kontron focuses on distributed unit (DU) rather than the centralized unit (CU) in the RAN, he said.
“We recognize that the large data-center-type server manufacturers have a very strong presence … when it comes to the CU in very dense urban types of deployments,” Smith said: “By having the ability to rescale or repurpose the system or add features or functions in the field, you have an opportunity to evolve, especially on remote deployments, without having to send a person out to physically do that.”