ORAN Growing, but Operators Must Make It Fit With Legacy Networks

The move toward open radio access networks for 5G is accelerating, though questions remain about buy-in from major operators, speakers said at a two-day virtual forum by LightReading, which ended Thursday. Industry officials said making ORAN fit with legacy networks remains a challenge. Strand Consult's John Strand said in a Thursday report ORAN continues to underperform and reality doesn’t match the hype.

With every transition to a new generation of wireless “there’s an opportunity to do things differently,” which is why ORAN is getting a focus as 5G launches, said Michael Murphy, Ericsson North America chief technology officer, at the forum. Cloud RAN will start in 5G but become “a little bit more dominant as we move into the future towards 6G,” he said. The exceptions are providers building new networks, like Rakuten and Dish Network, he said. When a company has a legacy network “one of the challenges is the coexistence of two different systems,” he said: “They have different operational characteristics.”

Providers are moving to ORAN for the same reasons that tech moved to the cloud, Murphy said. Operators are looking for cost reduction and a way to offer new services more quickly “and it simplifies distributed architectures as well,” he said.

GSMA tried to put lots of emphasis on ORAN at the recent Mobile World Congress “but industry still grapples with the big challenge that OpenRAN is something operators test and talk about but not something operators buy,” said Strand: “If you attended the OpenRAN events at MWC, it was ‘The Usual Suspects’ who reused the arguments they have used for the past two years. We’re talking about people who referred to testing agreements with operators as commercial agreements.” Listening to smaller ORAN companies “it is clear that they are panicking that they are not getting the orders that they have probably promised their boards,” he said.

ORAN “has yet to notch a major commercial success,” Strand said. If ORAN gets the growth proponents predict, it will be less than one percent of 5G mobile sites in 2025 and not more than three percent in 2030, he said. ORAN is “too little, too late to make a difference in a world in which operators … deploy 10,000 classic 5G sites every month,” he said.

Network operators are focused on how to raise revenue and lower cost and “we should always remember that,” said Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director-RAN engineering. The top goal of ORAN is “creating a more flexible and a smarter RAN to maximize the efficiency of the network,” he said. AT&T also wants standardized interfaces between network components so “we can use white-box components, the white-box hardware for multiple vendor solutions so we’re not locked into a single vendor,” he said.

“We still have a long way to go, we still need to learn,” Akkaya said. The biggest challenge that remains is to make ORAN compatible with legacy networks, he agreed. “We need to take care of our legacy network first to keep our revenue stream in good health,” he said. “The operational model will change as the subscriber need dictates,” he said.

“We’re driving vendors really hard” on ORAN, said Andy Dunkin, Vodafone ORAN RF and digital platform development manager. “It’s not perhaps what vendors want to hear,” he said: “We have to have a single platform that does everything.” Dunkin said deployments will likely be different in the countries where it operates. “If you can have a common platform it brings economies, and that’s not to be ignored, as long as you don’t impede the open RAN and the flexibility of the open RAN operational platforms with any limitations that might exist in the legacy” network, he said.

ORAN is “deployed commercially on thousands of sites,” said Patrick Lopez, global vice president product management-5G at vendor NEC. “It is fulfilling the promises” in markets in Western Europe and North America, he said. “We believe that open RAN is a reality and that it is mature for commercial deployment at scale,” he said.

With continuing focus on ORAN, the performance will improve, said Kevin Smith, virtual RAN/mobile edge core team lead at tech vendor Kontron. Economy of scale is critical, he said. “The whole concept here is as the volumes pick up … the cost for the hardware that’s required, based on the volume of deployments, should continue to come down, which will benefit the entire market,” Smith said.

Rakuten Mobile CTO Sharad Sriwastawa said ORAN offers many advantages over traditional networks. With a smaller footprint, site acquisition is easier and rental costs lower, he said. “It’s easier to install for faster rollout.” Companies can upgrade an entire network “in a matter of hours,” he said.