O-RAN Getting Attention, and Some Traction, in US

The Barr statement could lead to “backsliding” away from the new technology, said Bob Everson, Cisco senior director-5G architecture. “There’s a lot of work going on,” he said. “We need to keep this moving forward because there’s so much inertia.” There's “always risk in change” but also in sticking with the status quo, he said.

Fifth-generation uses the same modulations and is packet-based like 4G, which is why it's moving forward quickly, but it also requires more flexibility than other generations of wireless, said Stein Lundby, Qualcomm head-corporate technology strategy. O-RAN shifts the architecture from “one monolithic network” to “a set of modules, each of them supplied by a different company,” he said.

Policymakers are watching, said Doug Brake, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation director-broadband and spectrum policy. Driving the discussion is the security “threat” from Huawei and its dominant role in the equipment market, he said. Brake was “a little disappointed” by what Barr said. “We have this short-term security risk represented by Huawei,” Brake said, but that’s easy to solve by not using Chinese equipment. There’s a bigger risk if the market “continues along the same integrated, non-modular way that it has for so long and Huawei continues to grab more and more market share,” he said. The company didn’t comment.

Cisco has always focused on multiple vendors, Everson said: “Some may argue that we had to be because we didn’t make a radio.” Cisco was an early proponent of O-RAN “back when people were really shaking their head a lot, thinking this was not going to be a deal development and now it’s great to see the progress,” he said. O-RAN combines IT with telecom, he said. O-RAN can make networks more efficient, with lower costs, Everson said. The basic network architecture has been the same for decades, he said. “As we move to 5G, operators have a choice to make, whether they want to just add 5G to that existing legacy and extend it further or if they want actually want to transform the network.”

If companies are able to take parts of the network “and run them as software, virtualize them over generic, low-cost commodity hardware, you can dramatically lower the cost of the actual equipment” and “increase your ability to innovate and roll out new services,” Brake said. The O-RAN Alliance is working on the new technology and has major equipment makers' support, not Huawei, which is “more skeptical” of open network architecture, he said. He noted Vodafone recently sought O-RAN quotes across the 14 countries where it has operations. Providers in Japan and India are looking at the technology, he said. In the U.S., the national carriers are interested, especially Dish Network that's building a fifth-gen network, he said.

The FCC, meanwhile, asked the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject Huawei asking the court overturn the agency’s ban on rural eligible telecom carriers using USF to buy from the Chinese firm (see 1912050050). In November, commissioners voted to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment on networks bought with USF dollars (see 1911220033).

“The Court lacks jurisdiction over the entire petition because it is not ripe, and separately over the portion of the Order initially designating Huawei as a covered company because that is not ‘final action,’” the FCC said in docket 19-60896: It “considered ample evidence that Huawei posed a potential threat to America’s communications networks, including information it received from members of Congress and Executive agencies with national security expertise.”