Carriers Embracing ORAN as They Strive to Make Networks More Flexible

There are still fewer than 25 open networks in the world, Teral said. When you go to Japan today and talk about ORAN, people say, “We were open RAN since the beginning of 5G,” he said. “It’s a nonissue. Now they are looking at bringing new features.” Japanese provider NTT Docomo has millions of subscribers on an open network, the largest such network in the world, he noted.

Japan embraced ORAN in part because of the memories of what happened during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Teral said. “It took a long time to rebuild a 3G infrastructure while rolling out LTE.” People in Japan recognized that their country is subject to disasters, and open networks mean they can react more quickly, he said.

In the U.S., AT&T is “in the driver’s seat,” Teral said, and in Canada, Telus and Bell Canada are replacing gear from Huawei with ORAN. With open interfaces, “you have the freedom of choice of components” you want to use in your network. Providers can start ORAN with a single central distribution unit vendor while buying radio units from multiple vendors, he said. By disaggregating hardware and software, “you have big flexibility,” he added. “Software and openness means innovation. This is the beauty of open RAN.”

Bernard Bureau, Telus' vice president of wireless strategy and services, said the provider’s move to an open network was “a lot smoother” than expected. For an operator like Telus, which is replacing state-of-the-art traditional gear with an open network to make it more secure, “our context is extremely different than a greenfield deployment, and the task at hand was not an easy one,” he said. “But we’re fully satisfied with our experience thus far.”

Telus is finding that the ORAN and virtual RAN “perform as good or better than traditional RAN and offer much more flexibility if you properly pick your suppliers,” Bureau added. But problems emerged as the company moved to “zero-touch provisioning” on the network. The issue wasn’t the platform or automation, “but the quality of the inputs and upstream processes,” he said. “It took a lot of process improvement to get to the desired success rate, and now we’re where we need to be.”

Sinan Akkaya, AT&T's director of RAN engineering, discussed the importance of rApps, which are software applications designed to manage and optimize the RAN. An open architecture “gives the operators the opportunity to update and optimize the network automation software almost constantly.” Using AI together with machine learning (ML) is “becoming more and more impactful on our daily operations,” he noted.

Combining AI and ML with rApps “brings so much flexibility and creativity, there’s almost no limits to our daily operations,” Akkaya said. “It’s so powerful,” and “that’s why it matters to us.” There’s no way AT&T can meet the demands and expectations of customers without “customizing” the network, he said. “There’s no other way to serve our customers in the way they want.”

With an open network, AT&T can better manage spectrum, access to the network and “who takes the first seat in the scheduler,” Akkaya said. “How do we manage dynamic coverage and quality control? ... These are operators’ problems.” An “AI/ML-based rApps world” means operators can adjust their networks “much faster and with higher quality.”

Carriers are seeing increasing demands on their networks from enterprise customers, said Malick Noor, chief revenue officer at AI company Aira Technologies. These customers demand lower latency than other consumers and place new demands at the “cell level,” he said, adding that rApps can help optimize the network and make it more agile.

Carriers also want to deploy new services within weeks or months, not years, Noor noted. Operators seek to deploy rApps for a specific service much more quickly than on the traditional network, he said. “It’s a game-changer for operators.”

Open networks have come “a very long way” since the O-RAN Alliance launched in 2018, said Dell'Oro Group analyst Stefan Pongratz. But from a revenue perspective, the results are only “mixed.” He said Dell’Oro estimates that cumulative ORAN revenues are approaching $10 billion a year and are expected to account for about a quarter of RAN expenditures by the end of the decade.

ORAN is “part of the RAN market now,” Pongratz added. The larger suppliers are offering ORAN technology, and many carriers see it as “integral” to the future of the networks, in addition to AI RAN and virtual RAN. But critics also note that the same big players continue to dominate the market as networks move to ORAN technology, he said.