Ask in the abstract, and most operators will say they favor opening up closed technologies. More participants brings more innovation, competitive pricing pressure, what could be bad? Well, more players can also mean more complexity, more complicated interdependencies, more opportunity for something to go wrong. That can be especially worrying when it comes to complex, mission-critical radio access network (RAN) technologies that have been closed and proprietary for years.
So, do the benefits of opening up the RAN outweigh the risks? The industry is about to find out.
Thanks to Open RAN (ORAN) initiatives and the advent of 5G, multiple vendors can now compete to provide RAN sub-components within a single network. Meanwhile, the advance of virtualized RAN (vRAN) solutions gives operators much needed flexibility in how and where they deploy RAN functions. Both ORAN and vRAN hold enormous potential—especially when combined to support new 5G networks and services. But, that’s not the full story. For real-world operators, especially those managing brownfield multivendor deployments, virtualization and disaggregation make the RAN far more complicated than it used to be.
You can’t hold back the evolution of radio networks, and you wouldn’t want to. There is far too much to gain. But if you’re going to tap into the benefits of ORAN and vRAN while minimizing the risk, you’ll need to think differently about how you test—and just how important testing is to your business.
Navigating RAN Challenges
ORAN and vRAN represent distinct technology evolutions, led by different standards bodies and initiatives. But, whether operators start on one path or the other, they will eventually look to converge them. As they do, they will be able to do some amazing new things, such as:
- Work with innovative RAN startups to bring new approaches to longstanding RAN challenges—optimizing radio spectrum, efficiently managing ultra-dense radio deployments, and more
- Implement customized RAN applications tailored to the needs of specific markets and verticals
- Draw on virtualization and increased competition to reduce RAN costs—by far the most expensive part of an operator’s infrastructure
Before any of that can happen though, operators need to address the new challenges that come with open virtualized RANs. These include:
- Evolving technologies and standards: The industry has made major strides with ORAN and vRAN, but we’re still in early days. Initially at least, operators will need to deal with the growing pains that come with new architectures, new standards, and new vendors that offer compelling capabilities but have little experience with large-scale commercial deployments.
- Increased complexity: Operators have long advocated opening up the proprietary protocols and interfaces in monolithic RAN solutions. But these changes carry a cost. While open interfaces allow for more competition and innovation, they raise new requirements for multivendor standards compliance and interoperability that simply didn’t exist before in this space.
- New security concerns: Adding new vendors, components, and open interfaces to the RAN inevitably means adding new potential targets that malicious actors could seek to exploit. Securing every component, vendor, and supply chain involved in the RAN becomes much more complicated—and important.
Testing Matters More than Ever
With yesterday’s monolithic RAN technologies, it was the RAN vendor’s responsibility to make sure all the sub-components fit together and worked the way they should, without diminishing performance or security. In an ORAN/vRAN world, that job now falls to operators or system integrators. One operator’s RAN might look radically different from another’s. So, it’s now essential to validate the performance, reliability, and multivendor interoperability of every implementation, as well as to verify the security of each vendor component and supply chain involved. And, since 5G networks are much more dynamic, with slices and multivendor software changing all the time, that testing needs to be continuous.
Traditional testing approaches, where you would comprehensively test every aspect of every configuration before deploying, won’t really work here. Next-generation RANs are too complex and dynamic to test everything in a reasonable timeframe, especially when facing fierce competitive pressure to deliver new 5G services. But you can’t just wait for problems to crop up with your customers either.
Fortunately, network testing technologies are evolving alongside ORAN and vRAN to solve this conundrum. The new strategy looks like this: You use automated testing to rapidly validate the operational and mission critical RAN capabilities before you deploy. Then, you lean on continuous testing and assurance solutions to continually seek out potential problems and optimizations. With these tools running in your RAN—especially after changes—you can identify, diagnose, and resolve most issues before they ever impact users.
With ongoing automated testing, you can make sure your next-generation RAN is giving you the performance and capabilities you expect. You can validate that all participants continue to deliver multivendor interoperability and openness. And you can bring the benefits of open virtualized RAN to your customers and your business—without adding new headaches and risk.
