Chips Act Seen as Important to Telecom Sector, Future of ORAN

The $54.2 billion Chips and Science Act, signed into law in August (see 2208090062) will be significant for how industry will look down the road, experts said Tuesday during a USTelecom webinar. The act includes $1.5 billion to spur open radio access networks. Experts also said they don’t expect big future moves from the FCC on ORAN, after a 2021 notice of inquiry.

The Commerce Department released an “implementation strategy” statement Tuesday as it prepares to address the requirements of the act (see 2209060015). Speakers said the quick release of the strategy shows the importance to the administration.

“I’m sure they’re looking to put some immediate wins on the board,” said Diane Rinaldo, Open RAN Policy Institute executive director. “We were told to think big, bring ideas on what would help bring open RAN to scale,” she said. NTIA is still “absorbing” information and then will have to write the parameters of the ORAN grants program, said Rinaldo, former NTIA acting administrator.

The ORAN industry, like the chips industry, is concerned about too much technology manufacturing being centered in global hot spots, Rinaldo said. “While there are national security concerns about where things are made, there also are economic security concerns,” she said. “We need to make sure that our supply chain is diversified beyond just a handful of locations around the world,” she said.

“It has been so impressive to see the bipartisan alliance at work” that led to the act's passage, said Tom Quillin, Intel vice president-global security policy. Quillin said growing a chips industry will create a “wave of demand for workers” in the U.S. “There will be immediate benefits as fabs get built, as thousands of jobs are created, right away, with construction, and thousands of ongoing jobs,” he said.

There’s a “natural linkage” between chips and ORAN and it made sense to address them in one bill, Quillin said. “We know that the chip shortage of the past couple of years has a broad effect on a lot of different consumer products,” he said: “Less well understood and less covered has been the impact to the comms infrastructure and communications business,” he said. “Time is of the essence -- we need to move very rapidly,” he said.

Both the chips and ORAN parts of the legislation are important to AT&T, said Chris Boyer, vice president-global security and technology policy. “We’re a large consumer of chips, obviously, given the devices that we sell to our customers and the network equipment that we deploy,” he said. ORAN “is effectively a means of opening up the interfaces between the various components in the radio access part of our networks,” which traditionally “have been very closed,” he said.

“There has been a very limited amount of providers in that part of the network,” Boyer said. With ORAN “individual providers can make different piece-parts of the RAN -- one entity can provide radios, other entities could provide basebands, other entities could provide software … or you could move to more open sources, white labeling, a lot of different options,” he said. AT&T doesn’t expect instant change because of ORAN, but the theory is “over time it diversifies the marketplace and brings more competition,” he said.

Chip shortages won’t be over right away, Quillin said. “It’s going to take a while for us to dig out of the hole that we created by having this level of vulnerability and lack of resilience,” he said. The first new fabs could come online “within a couple of years” due to the CHIPS Act, he said.

The FCC was “an early leader” on ORAN and Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel started talking about virtualized the RAN in 2019, Rinaldo said. “As an organization, we don’t support mandates and the FCC is a regulatory agency,” she said: “Being a regulatory agency also allows them to be a convenor, and they have done a great job of convening the different voices of this conversation to ask questions about where we are, what stands in our way.”

The FCC “has been a big proponent” of ORAN and gave carriers and ORAN suppliers an opportunity to talk about what each is doing, Boyer said. “The commission can continue to do what they’ve been doing, which is largely kind of playing a supportive role … and trying to promote ORAN as a viable option,” he said. The FCC can also be an advisor to NTIA as the ORAN program is rolled out, he said.