Open RAN – Myth vs Reality

Open RAN can be a divisive topic at times, with staunch advocates extolling the virtues of an Open RAN solution, whilst a significant contingent of industry players either reserving judgement or simply planting their feet firmly in the “it won’t work” camp.

Ultimately, time will tell; despite the concept seeing a huge investment in time, research and standardization, a comparison of production Open RAN deployments with the more familiar single vendor solution approach sees Open RAN presently as a very distant second place. In fact, Open RAN contributes a very small percentage to the overall installed base of 5G RAN equipment.

It is fair to say that Open RAN remains a nascent technology, but rumblings in the industry suggest that Open RAN will not remain this way, by any means. AT&T’s fairly recent announcement of its investment in Ericsson’s Open RAN solution indicates that there is an industry appetite, although in this particular case it will be interesting to see how open the solution will be. There are plenty of other investment examples taking place, but some fundamental areas still have questions hanging over them.

• New Concept? – Open RAN relies on techniques that have long been used in other parts of the mobile network. Control and User Plane separation, cloud computing, etc. The really new concept relating to the use of RAN Intelligent Controllers and adoption of AI/ML technology has yet to make a significant appearance. Where are those commercial x apps and r apps?
• Cost Savings – where do the cost savings exist, or possibly, do the cost savings exist at all? The small number of deployments to date means that it’s difficult to get solid financial data to evidence the cost savings that Open RAN is supposed to provide.
• Competition – is Open RAN increasing competition? Or are we seeing a new breed of vendor lock-in in the guise of the Open RAN blueprint? How can the smaller players innovate when their R&D budget is a fraction of the bigger players?
• Security – does an Open solution mean that security weaknesses will be identified more quickly, or does it simply mean that we have a wider attack service with security only being as strong as the weakest link in the vendor chain? With many governments banning Chinese equipment manufacturers from cellular networks and at the same time encouraging Open RAN, where do the Chinese companies that contribute to the Open RAN ecosystem fit into the picture?

Conclusion

Fundamentally, we at Mpirical are impartial to technology trends – we’re just keen to teach what’s happening in the industry. We’re as interested as anyone to see what the future has in store for Open RAN so like you, we’ll be keeping a keen eye out for Open RAN over the next couple of years.