O-RAN Alliance Urges Focus on 'Scale' and Interoperability
The move to open radio access networks (ORAN) is happening, but it will require continuing focus on interoperability and scale, O-RAN Alliance Chair Abdurazak Mudesir said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “If we’re not able to scale the commercial deployment,” ORAN won’t “be worth the effort,” said Mudesir, group chief technology officer at Deutsche Telekom. The alliance held a separate event as part of MWC.
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The three most important concepts for ORAN remain openness, intelligence and virtualization, Mudesir said. “These are ... fundamental.” The alliance has been working with the 3rd Generation Partnership Project on a global standard “that puts openness [and] intelligence at the center,” he said. AI provides the capability to be “much more sophisticated” in managing ORAN, but also poses security risks.
The alliance is focused this year on open fronthaul, which involves transporting data from mobile units to the network and is critical for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology, Mudesir said. The other big focus is the RAN intelligent controller. “Last, but most definitely not least, is that advanced security assurance certification, zero-trust network architecture.” All ORAN architecture must be secure “by design.”
O-RAN Alliance members serve 4.5 billion customers worldwide -- “a significant portion of the entire world population,” Mudesir noted. “I’m calling on all of us to make sure that we deliver on the specification that we need to deliver, but also accelerate adoption.”
ATIS is working with the administration on using ORAN technology to diversify the RAN market, said Iain Sharp, the group's principal technologist. It has been creating a “minimum viable profile” of ORAN on the necessary specifications to meet the requirements of North American operators, which “has been very intense,” he said. “We have a lot of involvement and very detailed technical discussions from really all the players in North America.” ATIS is also working to bring ORAN into its standards, Sharp added.
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute is taking a global focus on ORAN, said Jan Ellsberger, its director-general. ETSI has an agreement to work with the O-RAN Alliance and adopted seven of its specifications, he said. ETSI doesn’t just “rubber-stamp” the standards, he said.
Instead, it is reviewing them in its technical committees, providing comments to the alliance “and by that improving the quality of the work,” Ellsberger said. Working with ETSI also helps the alliance get broader recognition of its activities, he added.
AT&T’s approach to ORAN is different from what the company hears via other carriers, said David Kinsey, an expert member of the U.S. provider’s technical staff. It's “network management driven” rather than open fronthaul driven, he said. “For us, the fundamental foundation … is to create a platform, an environment, where others can participate, and we can manage in a single way.”
One of the biggest problems AT&T has is managing all the companies that are part of an open network, Kinsey said. “Stability of the platforms themselves that actually allow for other partners to exit and enter the network is really important,” he said: “Without that, you will fail.”
AT&T is in the process of launching its service and management orchestration platform, which will be “widely available” on the network later this year, Kinsey said. “We’ve announced a number of application partners, and we’re working closely with Ericsson, particularly, in support of those partners and developing an ecosystem, developing a plan.”
Heavy Reading analyst Gabriel Brown said the standards process can appear confusing. “You have 3GPP specifications,” he said: “You have [the O-RAN Alliance] coming in and essentially filling gaps. … And then you have all of that coming back to ETSI” and other groups. “From the outside, it looks like we’ve got a situation of things going around in circles,” and “it’s kind of confusing.”