ORAN Must Be Secure To Be Accepted, Summit Told

Open radio access networks with high security take work because they increase the potential attack surface, an Ericsson executive said at the Telecom TV ORAN summit Thursday. Speakers said few ORAN startups are likely to survive.

ORAN has to be secure, said Scott Poretsky, Ericsson director-security. “Open RAN is being built for 5G and 5G is going to be supporting those use cases that impact our everyday lives.” The 3rd Generation Partnership Project “significantly raised the bar” on 5G security, he said: ORAN “needs to follow that lead.”

Strengths can be exploited, Poretsky said. ORAN “introduces new functions, new interfaces,” he said. ORAN will be on the cloud, which “introduces new security risks,” he said. Ericsson and other members of the ORAN Alliance are working to address those issues, he said.

Rimma Iontel, chief architect-Global Telco Team at Red Hat, predicted the market will consolidate. In the beginning, we’ll see “an explosion of new entrants, and it might start with hundreds,” she said. As the technology matures, “we’ll see the usual merger and acquisition dance … and it will probably shrink to a more manageable level,” she said.

Most entrants have been established companies, said CEO Jason Hoffman from the MobiledgeX edge computing company. “The question is whether someone wants to get entrepreneurial in this space and is actually capable of raising funds” and then having to qualify as a vendor to telcos, he said: “It’s a pretty high barrier of entry from a startup perspective.”

As a newer company targeting ORAN, Parallel Wireless feels the challenges, said President Keith Johnson. “The investment required to get to a certain minimum threshold is incredible,” he said: “The sales cycles are very challenging. But, importantly, we’re doing it.” ORAN lets vendors focus on solving specific issues, he said. “When Parallel Wireless started, we had to solve the whole problem of the RAN, or we had no way to approach customers.”

Others said ORAN needs highly specialized silicon and hardware. Base stations and other gear “from the start” have required “specialized silicon,” said Olivier Simon, Orange director-radio innovation. 5G, with massive multiple-input and multiple-output, requires much more computing power than 4G, he said: That affects how much silicon is needed.

“There is no really single approach,” with different types of silicon used in ORANs, Simon said. Small networks will use silicon that's “very flexible, very software-oriented,” he said. Larger networks require silicon “to be very, very optimized,” he said.

With 5G, the same silicon has to have as much as 300 times the “functionality” of 4G, said Harpinder Matharu, senior director-strategy at Silicon provider Xilinx. “While we are building the silicon we also have to anticipate what new requirements may emerge the next two to three years.”

Because of the cost of creating specialized chips, Xilinx advocates adaptable SoC architecture, Matharu said. “We can create a system that can be upgraded.”

"Merge 5G and AI together,” recommended Head-Product Management Adil Kidwai at EdgeQ, which builds 5G chip systems: AI needs to help 5G “in terms of many different functions, for example, spectrum monitoring, scheduling, coordination of different base stations.”