ORAN More Widely Accepted as the Network Technology of the Future
Open radio access networks are starting to hit their stride, executives said during a TelecomTV summit Wednesday. Speakers said the outlook has changed in just more than a year.
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ORAN has had “remarkable progress” in the past year, said Azita Arvani, CEO Americas at Rakuten Symphony. That was obvious at this year’s Mobile World Congress as compared to the MWC in 2022, she said. Last year people “were still talking about is the ORAN ready, how is the deployment,” she said. Now, “no one is doubting that open RAN is the way to go,” she said. Governments in the U.S., Japan and elsewhere are putting more emphasis on ORAN, she said.
“We can clearly see the great progress of the ORAN ecosystem,” said Alex Choi, chairman of the O-RAN Alliance and senior vice president-research and technology at Deutsche Telekom. The alliance recently concluded its Global Plugfest, he said. In earlier years, the focus was on “the basic components, testing and integration,” he said: “Now we can see very advanced … operability and performance testing, which takes much less effort to test.”
The Plugfest showed end-to-end ORAN systems are viable, Choi said. “We saw very successful security tests, like eliminating a denial of service attack on open front haul,” he said. “We verified that open RAN security is not any worse at all” than for legacy networks, he said. Research also points to potential energy savings through use of ORAN, he said.
For a long time, people went to meetings to talk about ORAN and standards, “trying to imagine how open RAN could be,” said Paco Pignatelli, Vodafone group head-radio product. Now product is in the field and providers are benefiting from the lessons learned, he said. ORAN “can be complex, particularly now” and “when you go to deployment you need to make sure you’re taking controlled risks” using technology that has already been shown to work, he said.
“It’s one thing to build a product to a standard and then have people use it,” said Randy Cox, vice president-product management, at Wind River, an ORAN company. There’s now an “openness of attitude” with companies “willing to be in each other’s labs, being willing to be in a common lab, working together, debugging problems and integration issues,” he said. “We have to have a very collaborative attitude towards the actual integration itself,” he said.
Wind River is working with Vodafone and is being compared with “not different versions of ORAN” but traditional network architecture “that has been in place for many, many years,” Cox said. “The bar is high” and the company has to meet key performance indicators that have been in place for a long time, he said. The challenge for ORAN is that comparing it with existing networks ignores how it allows innovation and “new ways of working, new applications,” said Francis Haysom, principal analyst at Appledore Research.
Ericsson is a top supporter of the ORAN Alliance, which is doing important work on integration, said Paul Challoner, vice president-network products. The alliance is “not only writing the initial specifications for open RAN, which is incredibly important, but really making them robust,” he said. One key area is the lower-level split between the radio and the baseband, he said. There was an initial specification, and now the alliance is working on the “next generation” of specs, he said.
Experts agreed system integrators will play a role in ORAN. Small providers, in particular, need outside expertise to deploy ORAN, Pignatelli said. There will be “multiple options to go to, and all of them are developing,” he said.
Providers can rely on a system integrator to do the integration and testing, do it themselves or rely on an existing hardware or software vendor, said Eugina Jordan, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) chief marketing officer. Providers have hundreds of options to choose from and testing can get expensive, she said. TIP advocates the use of federated labs like the one the project runs, she said. We can test all the “permutations” and make them available, which can save time and cut costs, she said.
“It’s all about scaling -- you can’t do too many custom integrations,” Challoner said: “Getting to scale as quickly as possible” is “the challenge we face here.”