O-RAN: Unlocking Innovation. Window of Opportunity for Startups!

The technology evolution is happening faster than we thought. If we look back just two decades, the voice communication aided by SMS was considered as the technology climax and luxury turned into necessity. That journey continued, the communication medium progressed, and data rate climbed from 160 Kbps to multiple Gbps while storage scaled from MB’s to TB’s. It’s interesting to note the technology progression by looking at the fact that iPhone we are carrying in our pocket today comes up with 512 GB storage & 2.6 GHz processing power, has 7 million times more storage and 100,000 times the processing power of the computer used during the Apollo 11 mission which landed the man on the moon some 50 years ago. The Moore’s law associated with Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, states that processing power & the capability of our computers would double every two years while cost would reduce drastically and the growth in this segment is exponential. These are quite interesting facts to know how fast the technology is changing and where it’s taking us along with this evolution.

This is exactly happening when we talk about the telecommunication space where the technology shift and transformation is eye-catching and quite rapid. The mushroom growth of Startups in multiple industry segments not only unlocked the much needed innovation but also diversified the Supplier ecosystem, enhanced the participation and brought in an open market competition that has been limited to few suppliers particularly in the Telco space. The advancement in semiconductor industry revolutionized the very fabric of Technology leaving a profound impact on the society, drastically changing the way life is led. The knowledge that once gained by traveling thousands of miles from one country to other in the past, is now available in the palm of your hand in the form of smart phone that gives us almost unlimited access to every piece of information whether it’s related to Earth or the Universe. It’s an established fact that the journey from 4G to 5G is quicker than the previous technologies shift, 2G to 3G to 4G. This is a never-ending phenomenon and is not going to stop here while we are now hearing about 6G. ?

Open-RAN is one such next-generation wireless Infrastructure solution that is gaining significant traction in the Telecom market vehemently supported by O-RAN Alliance comprised of the Global community including Operators, vendors & academic institutions all stitched together to transform the Radio Access Network industry towards common open architecture/standardized interfaces, fully interoperable, built-in with data-driven intelligence & virtualized RAN. The major advantage that Operators could construe with O-RAN deployment is the Datacenter economics, Cloud agility, reduced level of complexity and the deployment & operational costs. Reason being it’s picking lot of momentum for the last many years for the green field as well as brown field networks where the Operators are strategizing their technology enablement building end to end Cloud native architecture including O-RAN, mass scale Automation supported by auto-healing and diversifying their hardware supply chain. ?

The realization among the Operators towards O-RAN adoption comes into play when they looked at the Hyperscale ecosystem built by the giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon getting economics scale which the Operators were unable to achieve with the closed & proprietary based systems from existing vendors. The technology needs to be opened for an effective 5G adoption right from Core to the last mile of the network and make it more participative & collaborative with the inclusion of more players to expand the ecosystem thus making it more robust and innovative. So practically what O-RAN does is, it disaggregates the Radio, Compute, Control & the Management plane, all interacting with each other through 3GPP compliant standardized open interfaces while the radio software components (RAN workloads such as VNFs & CNFs) being placed on the off-the shelf hardware (COTS) over Cloud Stack instead of closed & proprietary hardware to get the economics of scale and agility. The solution no doubt enables with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), manageable from all the perspective through automated computing processes, smaller footprint & energy efficient installation.

The technology shift here when we specifically talk about the O-RAN adoption, calls for the emergence of the startups to stretch the RAN ecosystem introducing supplier diversity which was led by few vendors in the past. There is no denying the fact that open network delivers cost effective and vendor-agnostic solution. Just to mention the key players engaged in developing O-RAN ecosystem are mostly the US-based Technology companies growing in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization space, like Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, VMware, EMC Dell, Radisys, intel, Altiostar, Airspan etc. while Operators like Rakuten Mobile, Dish Wireless, Verizon are the early adopters of this new technology. ?

The Radio Access Network being a giant market which alone constitutes around 70% of an Operator budget and as per the RAN Analysts the Global RAN market size is projected to reach 50 BUSD by 2026 growing at a CAGR of ~11%, while the O-RAN global market is estimating that it made revenue of ~ 420 MUSD in 2021 which will be growing to 21 BUSD in 2028 at CAGR of 83% over the forecast period of 2020-2028. This offers a golden window of opportunity for different startups in Pakistan as well to come forward and collaborate with such companies to mark their participation which will ultimately add a lion share in our Digital economy. It’s a high time that communities like Operators, vendors and academic institutions in our country become an active part of the O-RAN Alliance and considering the talent that we have with the support of the Government Digital Transformation ambition, it’s not going to be a mission impossible rather a low-hanging fruit. We have already seen groundbreaking developments in Pakistan Telecom market in the form of the deployment of Cloud Core & RAN and 5G trials. The launch pad is already established while the industry players have to gather to build the desired orchestra to contribute towards the technological evolution.

Last but not the least, the concept is equally exciting for the TowerCo’s that have a critical role to play in creating that momentum and their equal participation in the alliance. The transformation is not only limited to the Communication Service Providers in Pakistan, but it radiates down to the Tower industry where Digital Infrastructure would open-up multiple business streams and opportunities like fiberization (fiber to the tower), small cells installation, edge data centers, active sharing leading a way to the deployment of O-RAN technology. Though it will take time, but the trend is moving into the same direction where e2e RAN at the edge would be hosted by the TowerCo’s considering the mobile broadband demand, increase in network densification & investment in the smart cities to realize ubiquitous 5G penetration in our country. We are anticipating 2023 as a game changing year in Pakistan from technology perspective due to planned 5G spectrum auction by PTA but it’s equally important that underlying infrastructure should be well in place with all the prerequisites prior to that event, required to successfully launch 5G services in Pakistan. ???