Is open RAN right for near-term rip-and-replace?
Huawei equipment has been ordered removed from networks in the United States and the United Kingdom with speculation that other European markets could soon follow. Advocates of open radio access network technology see this an opportunity to take market share from incumbent vendors like Ericsson.
But, according to Ericsson’s CEO Borje Eckholm, Europe is lagging in 5G (and 4G) and the value associated with the digital transformation of verticals, including healthcare, logistics and smart cities. Speaking on a July 17 earnings call, Eckholm said Europe needs to accelerate 5G deployments and that he currently doesn’t see open RAN technologies as facilitating that.
Based on his reckoning, Europe is behind other markets in 4G by an average of two to three years. “That has led to a loss of a lot of economic value in Europe as a continent,” Eckholm said, noting that, with the exception of Sweden’s Spotify, most unicorns come from the U.S. and China.
“If we are going to repeat that mistake [with 5G] in Europe, I think the European economy has a problem. Europe, as a continent, needs to not be behind in 5G…The big value of 5G is not the network, the network infrastructure. It’s not the operators. It’s actually the applications that run on top of the network. If we are on purpose delaying 5G in Europe, then we’re also hurting our economic future.”
The U.K. government last week announced that Huawei’s gear must be completely removed from the country’s 5G networks by the end of 2027, following new recommendations by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) on the impact of U.S. sanctions against the telecommunications vendor. Via trade sanctions, the U.S. government is cutting off Huawei and ZTE’s access to domestic tech as well as key technologies–semiconductors and fabricator TSMC–manufactured using U.S.-made equipment.
With the rip-and-replace timeframe detailed, Vodafone U.K. called for the government to abandon an upcoming 5G spectrum auction because that capital will need to be shifted to cover the equipment replacement.
During the conference call, one of the questions considered operators could use these latest turns to stall for time thereby slowing down 5G investments, hence Eckholm’s comment around intentional delays.
On open RAN, Ericsson contributes to the O-RAN Alliance, which develops interoperability specifications to enable operators to mix-and-match base station and radio hardware and software.
“We are going to be a participant,” Eckholm said of open RAN. “We’re already active. But for the high performance applications, today we do not see O-RAN as a way to speed up the rollout. It’s rather a way to slow down right now. When O-RAN is ready, we’re gonna be there.”
