5G , Open RAN and some recent conversations

While engaged in a strategic consulting project with an Energy and Utility customer (Muni/CoOp segment), the question of #5G and #RAN (#OpenRAN or not) came up. Kept me thinking on some key challenges when deploying an ORAN network (brownfield/greenfield rollouts) and what advice do I have for the customer to get started ?

The world is moving towards Open & Software Defined 5G RAN. (Similar to our SD-WAN saga). O-RAN ALLIANCE O-RAN is the center of the trend and a lot of experimental interoperability tests are starting to take place around the world but I believe customers are not fully exposed to them yet. I had to give some advisory update and guidance in our first discovery meeting. We started with the classic RCR Wireless RAN splits-logical view infographic and quickly delved into RU, DU, CU functional split concepts to set the stage for Open RAN. I am summarizing the highlights of the customer challenges and I am looking forward to some thoughts from experts here.

1. Ecosystem readiness:

Customer concern: The number of vendors providing Open RAN solutions may be limited, reducing some flexibility of vendor selection. Even though we are moving out from monolithic architectures, using the same vendor for all the technology components is not truly endorsing O-RAN. Why is that we are staying with one vendor?

Advisory Update: Although we are encouraging the growth of the vendor ecosystem through industry collaboration and support for standards. Engage with multi-vendor consortiums to broaden choices but no harm in staying with one vendor approach as the ecosystem is still growing.

2. Old Legacy Infrastructure – compatibility issues?

Customer concern: Integrating Open RAN with existing legacy infrastructure can be complex and may require updates to ensure compatibility?

Advisory Update: Develop a phased migration plan, conduct a thorough assessment of existing infrastructure, and implement necessary updates incrementally. Use gateway solutions to bridge legacy and Open RAN components (Thank you Nokia Bell Labs and the 5G communities)

3: Cost overruns

Customer concern : The migration process may incur additional costs, and it can be challenging to manage budgets for us.

Advisory Update: Explore funding options, and consider leveraging cost-sharing models with vendors. Continuously monitor and optimize costs throughout the migration. By addressing these challenges through careful planning, collaboration with industry stakeholders, and ongoing communication, telecom operators have successfully deployed Open RAN networks in both greenfield and brownfield scenarios. Continuous monitoring and adaptability are key to overcoming unforeseen challenges during the deployment process.

4: Integration Complexity and Interop confidence

Customer concern: Integrating various vendors' components and ensuring seamless interoperability can be a tall order. Can testing be done in house? Can cloud hosting and execution help?

Advisory Update: Establish simpler test plans, collaborate closely with vendors, and perform decent testing in a lab environment before deployment. In discussing upgrades of existing RAN deployment using newer vRAN, we gave insights on Nokia and also a pitch on recent 英伟达 + 富士通 and Cybersecurity Community update which they were somewhat aware of. ?(Note: As per NVIDIA, along with its Aerial SDK and GPU/DPU platforms and Fujitsu of course have teamed up for the collaborative and practical end-to-end interoperability testing to facilitate the realization of the next phase of RAN evolution. Aerial is the key building block of Telco 5G vRAN, AI-on-5G, RAN-in-the-Cloud, and Aerial Research Cloud. https://developer.nvidia.com/aerial-sdk)

?I am asking my community ?(both NVIDIA and external) here for support as well to chime in. Besides NVIDA+Fujitsu and Nokia leading with insights, are there any solid interop test, best practices. Looking forward to hearing from teams, or DM me.

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