As Open RAN momentum grows, Altiostar is focused on the transition from greenfield to brownfield, ecosystem development, and private enterprise 5G
BARCELONA–Most any business problem (or opportunity) is, at its core, a problem of scale–balancing customization with replicability, cost control with growth, maintaining the appropriate proportion of investment and return. As operators around the world, both new market entrants and storied incumbents, explore and implement Open RAN technologies, we’re seeing this issue of scale play out in real time and potentially reshape the telecommunications sector and, by virtue of its reach into near every vertical industry, reshape global commerce.
Open virtualized RAN specialist Altiostar has chalked up significant greenfield Open RAN wins with Rakuten Mobile in Japan and in the United States with DISH. Now the company is working to driven Open RAN into brownfield networks, notably in Europe with multi-national communications service provider Telefonica.
This move from ground-up builds to the exacting introduction of Open RAN into large, distributed networks is one of the three dimensions Altiostar Executive Vice President and Chief of Strategy and Product Thierry Maupile discussed with RCR Wireless News in a sit-down interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“As we have discussed before, the adoption by the greenfield and the validation by the greenfield has been extremely important for us and for the industry,” Maupile said. “This has given confidence to the brownfield.”
Given that both categories of customers and potential customers are focused on 4G and 5G, this has guided Altiostar’s growth process and investment in achieving service parity with disaggregated radio systems. “We moved from one large customer which was obviously Rakuten to the next top five which are mostly greenfield, Maupile said, “but then we started to have brownfield. Now we have the next 15 and they are all brownfield.”
He continued: “The other thing which is important is the business model. The brownfields, they have a use case in mind…densification, supply chain diversity, new frequency bands. I think they are struggling a little bit with the fact the incumbents are playing games….But it’s very clear that when it’s standalone 5G, it’s going to be a very different scenario. That’s why I believe some brownfields, they don’t want to wait. They want to begin inserting Open RAN.”
As for what all of that means for Altiostar, “We know that there are probably 70-plus operators that are considering deployment of Open RAN. We are focusing. It’s a matter of scale now.”
To go fast, go alone; to go far, go together
What’s happening today with Open RAN, and what has gotten the technology to the point it is today, is the result of laborious and collaborative research, standardization, refinement, and repetition. This difficult and necessary work is undertaken by the O-RAN Alliance and the Telecom Infra Project, both of which count among their members companies too numerous to list with domain expertise spanning a staggering breadth of disciplines. In many ways, the disaggregation of radio systems is the result of aggregation of focus, dedication and purpose.
This work, Maupile said, will “drive an innovation curve which is much faster than you can build with a traditional model. When you can use 5G for so many different things, you need this versatility of technology to bring more performance, better economics.”
To circle back to the drive toward service parity and flexibility of system configuration to meet a diversity of deployment scenarios, Maupile noted the importance of silicon vendors embracing Open RAN. Indeed, Qualcomm made a significant move this week in announcing its 5G distributed unit accelerator card meant at a high level to drive operator adoption of virtualized RAN take some of the heat off of compute-intensive baseband processes running on servers.
Tantra Analyst Founder and Principal Prakash Sangam goes into detail in this piece but here’s a preview. The DU, he wrote, “is one of the key parts of any virtual/Open RAN system, as it manages latency-sensitive functions such as demodulation, beamforming, channel coding, etc…The biggest reason why virtualization of RAN did not happen till now, while virtual core networks have been mainstream for some time, is these latency-sensitive functions. General purpose processors are highly inefficient for such workloads. The industry has come to realize that a dedicated hardware accelerator is the only feasible solution.”
Into the depths of the third dimension
5G is certainly a consumer technology that is and will unlock interesting new applications and enable immersive new types of experiences. But in terms of long-term accretive revenue, this will flow to operators and their vendors by way of 5G for the digital transformation of enterprises. As the telecoms sectors works to tailor 5G NR specifications for particular verticals, produce the right types of devices, and transform their own sales organizations to speak specifically to business outcomes rather than technology for the sake of technology, several things are informing how that will happen. Regulators are freeing up spectrum for use by industries, removing a major gating factor; the capex lift is decreasing as proprietary boxes give way to software systems an enterprise IT department can wrap their minds around; and operators are partnering with hyperscalers and vertically-focused system integrators that can deliver private networks tuned to the needs of a particular business.
There is “strong market-readiness for private 5G for enterprises,” Maupile said. “A lot of focus is on the use case because that’s where you start in private 5G. Private 5G is going to benefit what we’re doing. 5G has to be simple–plug and play, 5G-as-a-service. This is what is different from an G before. It’s not just more speed; it’s going to be that but 5G is going to be the first G delivered as-a-service and it will most likely happen for the enterprises customers.”
For that to happen in a meaningful way, there needs to be a strong focus on a cloud-based architecture, and automation tools to let the systems operate and optimize themselves with minimal hands-on input. Another important factor is distribution of compute power to the network edge, where data is created, so low-latency applications aren’t compromised because data is being piped back to a central data center.
But there’s also the problem of fragmentation–the enemy of scale. Maupile focused in on the diversity of bands, sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave, that can widely vary from market to market. “We need to make sure we have enough radio vendors and the problem is radio is a business where you need volume.”
Those are the dimensions, those are the problems, those are the opportunities, and like virtually every single thing, it’s a matter of scale. Philosophers, economists, politicians, generals, revolutionaries, scientists, novelists, even wildly unqualified telecoms industry trade journalists, have all weighed in on this with varying degrees of clarity since time immemorial. Maybe John Coltrane said it best: “I’m into scales right now.”
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