While Mavenir’s John Baker, senior Vice President of business development, is clear-eyed about challenges, both technical and business, the Open RAN ecosystem and other stakeholders need to work through, he sees material progress in adoption of open, multi-vendor radio systems as well as a long tail of innovation there for the taking. With regard to the RAN Intelligent Controller, Baker explained that harnessing network data to make dynamic optimizations will enable service providers to tune networks in a manner never before possible while also tying back to the Open RAN value proposition of lowering TCO but in a more nuanced way then simply lower capital and operating costs.
On the RIC: “This is a great area where operators can actually differentiate their networks,” he said, calling out improvements in ability to understand and respond to consumer behaviors, improve mobility, make more efficient use of spectrum in dense network environments, and optimize power consumption, among other benefits. “You start to get TCO benefits have not truly been discussed in the industry.” With imminent commercial deployments that “will start to prove this,” Baker said, “You’re going to start to see cost and saving benefits that are extremely large and are baked into licensing policy, spectrum assets and a number of areas. The RIC needs to have open interfaces, the APIs need to be open. The RIC is where the true benefits of Open RAN, outside of the diversification from vendor lock, are going to be seen in the future.”
For Open RAN, should common components command a common price?
As for challenges to Open RAN adoption, and the fostering of a vibrant, competitive vendor pool wherein smaller players are capable of competing against large RAN vendors, Baker discussed component procurement as an area ripe for reshaping. This relates to the fact that many Open RAN systems rely on commercial off the shelf components, servers and chips particularly. He acknowledged this was a “provocative” position but said semiconductor vendors are hindering the growth of smaller companies in the space, and in turn hindering the parallel goals of vendor diversification and innovation, by sticking to long-standing volume-based pricing models.
Just like Open RAN has opened up interfaces, it’s time for an “opening up of the semiconductor business,” Baker said. “A lot of vendors end up using the same chips with the same interfaces and essentially the same part number number one those chips. As a company you buy x components and pay x price. Small companies are actually being charged [the same as larger companies] and…have a barrier to entry for the size of the company. I think this is clearly the next level of challenge. How do you get the best price for a chipset or components are being used across the Open RAN community? The smaller companies are actually paying, if you like, potentially for the larger companies to get the best price as well. At some point there needs to be some leveling of price for common components. If it’s a common part that everybody is using in their radio or compute platform, then everyone should be paying the same price for it.”
As a proof point, Baker recalled the Telecom Infra Project-led Evenstar effort to create common 4G and 5G remote radio units at a sub-$1,000 price point. “Why should innovation be stifled because semiconductor vendors take advantage of the smaller companies? It’s a subject of great debate.” There’s a political angle here as well.
In the U.S. President Joe Biden recently signed into law the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act which will provide $280 billion to expand domestic semiconductor manufacturing and R&D, and includes is $1.5 billion for Open RAN which. Open RAN Policy Coalition Executive Director Diane Rinaldo said in a statement, “The funding for Open RAN research and development included in this legislation is critical to increasing supplier diversity and catapulting the next generation of telecommunications network innovation.” In the U.K. the Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport recently published a set of Open RAN principles that speak to the goal of Open RAN as a vector of supply chain diversification given the criticality of mobile networks. The U.K. is also working with Korean counterparts to fund and support Open RAN R&D with a particular focus on power efficiency.
Open RAN “opening up opportunity for engineers”
Beyond that, Baker said commercialization from Dish, 1&1 and other global operators both greenfield and brownfield, along with moves from Amazon and Microsoft to support open and cloud-based networking, and other commercial developments stand as strong evidence that Open RAN is very much a going concern.
“We’re firm believers in open interfaces and trying to ensure the market doesn’t step backwards in terms of the progress that has been made in opening interfaces and vendor diversification,” he said. Hardware/software disaggregation “has been going on for the last 10-plus years,” Baker continued. “It really started with the core…[Now] we’re seeing the world really follow the next step and take that into the RAN. The great thing about Open RAN, it’s opening up opportunity for engineers…on a global basis to really get back in and get engaged.”
