US Lagging Behind Rest of World on Open RAN, Warns Mavenir Executive

U.S. carriers are falling behind much of the world on open radio access networks, said John Baker, Mavenir senior vice president-business development, in an interview. “The train has left the station,” he said: “Pretty much all of Europe,” parts of Africa and the Middle East are embracing ORAN. “The sad part of it is the U.S. has still made no more progress.” Dish Network is the only major U.S. carrier deploying ORAN, he said. “We’re waiting for the rip-and-replace monies issue to get sorted out because ORAN can save the U.S. taxpayer a lot of money,” he said. The FCC plans to announce cuts on a $1.9 billion program for removing Huawei and ZTE from carrier network in June, including proposals using ORAN (see 2202090031). Mavenir announced last year it’s working with Montana’s Triangle Communications to upgrade its network. Mavenir last week unveiled OpenBeam, a new suite of ORAN compliant radios. The company invested in “high performance areas” for radios and is working with others on radio designs, Baker said. “At the end of the day, Mavenir is a software company,” he said. “We’ve invested some of our dollars to seed the open RAN ecosystem to get this radio design, development and manufacturing going,” he said. “Hopefully this is the start of a bring-back-to-America approach of radios that can then be sold in the open-RAN community to operators on a global basis,” he said: “The U.S. has the skill set to do this, and we’ve demonstrated that.” One of the greatest needs for ORAN is radios with open interfaces that are 3rd Generation Partnership Project approved, Baker said. “The global market potentially needs tens to hundreds” of radio models, he said. Nokia and Ericsson offer an alternative to the Chinese providers, but their radios “aren’t open RAN, and they’re not willing to share, at this point, their radios with others in terms of ensuring a diverse supply chain,” Baker said.