Consumers Figuring Out What 5G Means: Verizon's Dunne

Most consumers need to be educated on what 5G is and what it can do for them, said Verizon Consumer Group CEO Ronan Dunne at a Fierce Wireless virtual event. It means new uses, first for business and then consumers, he said. Most of the focus Monday was on open radio access networks. Vodafone expects the first commercial deployments this year, said Santiago Tenorio, network architecture team head.

Verizon’s C-band deployment will span the U.S., supplementing urban high-band offerings, Dunne said. Verizon plans to deploy 15,000 small cells in 2021 and isn’t adding traditional towers, he said: Unlike any other U.S. carrier, “we will have one single, contiguous coverage layer of midband spectrum, without any gaps, without any power limitations.” On COVID-19, Dunne said about 20 of Verizon’s 1,600 stores are closed now, vs. 250 in January. Many customers are still buying online, he said.

Vodafone is looking at ORAN deployments, Tenorio said. The provider has deployed ORAN pilots in the U.K., India and Turkey, with Ireland next, he said. ORAN is “closer and closer to being a mainstream technology.” Vodafone tests include 2G-4G technology, mainly in the 1,800 MHz band, he said.

Among the first commercial deployments will be open networks by Vodafone in the U.K., Dish Network in the U.S. and Rakuten in Japan, Tenorio said. “No one questions that it will happen.” FCC commissioners last week approved 4-0 an ORAN notice of inquiry (see 2103170049).

Because of the huge investments already made, most carriers are unlikely to completely replace their networks with ORAN, said Guy Turgeon, chief architect at Red Hat. “Even once full migration to open RAN is complete, some technologies are bound to stick around for much longer.” Old and new technologies will run “side by side.” Increasing standardization is important, with work needed on standardizing platforms, he said.

“We have a lot of expectation in ORAN -- we believe this is definitely the way to go,” said Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom executive lead-access disaggregation. “It’s only a question about when. … Nobody is even discussing having a legacy core anymore.” The challenge is making ORAN a “competitive, deployable solution,” compared with more traditional networks, he said. ORAN will give the provider more control of when new technology is deployed, he said. That DT is willing to work with its competitors on ORAN shows the company is serious, he said.

If you build a more traditional 5G network, “it will be so hard to change that direction,” said Azita Arvani, Rakuten Mobile general manager-Americas. There are “huge kinks to iron out” on ORAN, she said: The question isn’t “is the technology ready,” it’s “do we have a choice?”

ORAN is “the wave of the future,” said Monica Paolini, consultant at Senza Fili. “The question is how we get there, how long it’s going to take and what’s the path.”