A Huawei rip-and-replace mandate prompted Telus to pivot to Open RAN
Canadian operator Telus began working on virtualized Open RAN with Samsung in June 2020, and in February 2024 expanded that collaboration to include its 4G and 5G networks. Prompted by a governmental mandate to replace Huawei gear, Telus VP of Wireless Strategy and Services Bernard Bureau said, “We didn’t want to just replace the equipment with the same architecture…We wanted to take this opportunity…to jump into a new architecture.”
Speaking at the recent Open RAN Global Forum, available on-demand here, Bureau discussed Telus’s approach to integrating its disaggregated radio systems, including massive MIMO radios, and emphasized that if Telus can do it, so can most operators. He noted that Telus has 10% to 15% of the market cap of Tier 1 carriers in the U.S., and has an excellent but small technical team.
Bureau described three primary parts of the integration process. Integrating the virtual baseband, the network operating system and container platform fell to Samsung. “We didn’t see the value in inserting ourselves,” he said. Integration of open radios with the virtual baseband was done jointly with Telus, Samsung and another unnamed open radio unit provider. “We were able to arbitrage and resolve issues we encountered very rapidly. Our two suppliers had a great attitude, and the focus was on getting the job done, not pointing fingers. He said that process took six weeks. The third part was integrating various service management and orchestration (SMO) components with Telus taking the lead.
“The difficulty for integrating the SMO components together or integrating the Open RRAN with the virtual RAN, I think it’s been blown out of proportion,” Bureau said. “Some industry stakeholders are trying to make money out of it and it’s OK. When they argue that it’s too complex for an operator such as us to take this on, I completely disagree with them…It’s not a walk in the park…[but,] I can certainly attest that this was within our means for an operator our size.”
More on that: “I would really like to encourage all mobile network operators to push their suppliers to move faster into the O-RAN ecosystem…Don’t accept the rhetoric from established suppliers that O-RAN is more expensive; it’s not. That is doesn’t perform as well; it does. And that you need bespoke hardware; you don’t. If this is achievable for an operator the size of Telus, it’s likely attainable by lots and lots of operators globally.”
Beginning in the second half of 2023, Bureau said Telus began deploying Open RAN sites in the downtown area of an urban market, and were initially surprised with the performance quality and lack of issues. He said that was “confirmation that we needed…to leave traditional RAN behind.” In addition to Samsung, Telus’s Open RAN vendors include HPE, Intel and Wind River. Bureau said the Open RAN beta testing “exceeded performance parity against equipment we were removing.”
“We’re very satisfied with our O-RAN performance, and it’s only going to get better as time goes,” Bureau said.
