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AT&T and Verizon pledged their lives to open RAN this week
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President Biden is running with the idea of open RAN being a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE
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The dream of an open, multi-vendor RAN seems to be largely an illusion
AT&T and Verizon may have pledged their lives to open up Radio Access Network (Open RAN) technology this week, but this may not be the multi-vendor love fest some commentators were anticipating for the standard.
To its fullest extent, the US government has allocated $42 million to accelerate the development of the 5G Open Radio Access Network (open RAN), promoting the future of the specification with the major carriers mentioned above.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will fund a project by a group of U.S. and foreign operators, equipment vendors and academics to establish a research and development center in Dallas.
The aim is to create the standard as an alternative to the global number one vendor, the large Chinese company Huawei.
In fact, President Biden is running with the idea of open RAN being a bulwark against the likes of Huawei and ZTE. According to the Washington Post, he has mentioned open RAN to several world leaders.
Of course, for an open radio access network to become a viable global alternative, it must be inexpensive, reliable and available, which is why the government has reached out to “friendly” domestic and foreign operators and vendors to create this technology. One side effect of this strategy may be US vendors getting into the pure RAN game again, at least that's the hope, the post says.
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So what is open RAN?
Open RAN generally refers to architectures that first contain disaggregated components. Remote radio heads and baseband units (BBUs) are divided into central unit (CU), distributed unit (DU) and radio unit (RU).
The DU is connected to the RU via the forward transport link, and the CU is connected to the DU via the intermediate transport link. In contrast, the CU is connected via a backhaul to the mobile core. In open RAN, the interfaces between CU, DU, and RU must be agreed upon and defined openly, allowing the exchange of CU, DU, and RU from different vendors.
You can read more about open RAN mechanisms here.
Open RAN is supposed to enable operators to mix and match cellular software and hardware more easily, opening up the market to smaller equipment vendors and enabling operators to mix and match equipment from different vendors.
Single or multiple seller? this is the question.
After AT&T and Verizon announced open RAN plans. However, these operators used only one vendor (Ericsson in the case of AT&T) or two (Ericsson and Samsung in the case of Verizon), and the dream of a multi-vendor open RAN seems to be largely an illusion.
Deutsche Telekom has a “multi-vendor” agreement with Nokia and Fujitsu and has just started deploying an open RAN network to break its long-standing Huawei habit. “Since they also want Open RAN to be more than just a new interface and support multi-vendor RAN and virtual RAN, it will take some time for the economics to make sense,” Stefan Pongratz, RAN analyst at Dell'Oro Group, told Silverlinings. last year.
Smaller 5G players like Dish in the US may have gone the multi-vendor route. As EJL Wireless founder Earl Lum recently said, it's unrealistic to expect Verizon to use five radio vendors just because it's deploying open RAN equipment. The same is true (to a large extent) for many large operators: no one wants to deal with a large number of equipment vendors.
So, Open RAN may realistically end up being largely a plaything for the Scandinavian telecom mafia after all! Although by introducing a virtual RAN, we can say that Samsung has definitely raised its profile as a RAN supplier.
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