Why so much negativity about Open RAN?
It seems like every day, there is a new article about Open RAN, covering why it’s another vendor lock-in, it’s not secure, it’s not ready, it’s low performing, it’s in trouble, operators don’t support it – the list goes on.
Let’s break it down into simple pieces:
What is Open RAN?
Simply put, Open RAN is about hardware and software separation. That’s it!
This means radio and baseband hardware may be procured separately by the operators and use software from many different vendors.
Why it matters?
You may not realize it, but one of the biggest costs in the telecom world is tower climbing. When operators put a radio up on the tower, they want to make sure that it can serve its useful life (and more).
When they put a proprietary radio up on the tower, operators are stuck with the software vendors as swapping the radios becomes cost-prohibitive. In the past, some vendors took unfair advantage of this.
It’s already happening:
If you notice, operators around the globe are supporting Open RAN. Even in cases where they are buying from incumbent vendors, they are demanding that radio be Open RAN compliant.
Operators like Rakuten & Dish are leading the charge with greenfield deployments and many European operators (Vodafone, Telefonica, etc.) are already doing trials/ deployments.
Open RAN is needed:
As 5G is getting deployed, more spectrums are getting released and it will be critical for radios to be innovative. Open RAN will enable operators to take bold steps of putting more and more RAN up on the tower, knowing that they are future proof, including the ability to swap the software.
So why the negativity?
Any time you challenge the status quo, these types of negativity have unfortunately been part of the journey by incumbents.
Summary:
Open RAN is a movement about separating the hardware from software. The telecom industry has seen many such movements in the past with VoIP, virtualization, etc. As we saw with these other movements, innovation will be the primary driver and differentiator.
Why I am writing this:
As someone who was involved from the beginning of this movement (we used to call it Open Compute for RAN before Open RAN word was coined), and part of other similar movements in the industry.
As industry leaders, we need to be the change that moves us all forward.
Create??Publish???Amplify?? TechInfluencer, Analyst, Content Creator w/600K Social Media followers, Deep Expertise in Enterprise ?? Cloud ??5G ??AI ??Telecom ?? CX ?? Cyber ?? DigitalHealth. TwitterX @evankirstel
3 年Great chatting!
CEO & MD, Sonata Software
3 年Nice read. Thx!
Experienced senior people leader excel at building trusting teams; SDN & Intelligent Network Control Domain Expert
3 年Thank you and Good read ... Saw similar negativity around SDN/NFV 8/9 years ago ... In the end, I believe be apart of the disruptive force that makes positive change is a worthwhile challenge; with courage and trusting community we can overcome the negativity along the way.
I think we talked about this whole problem like 5 years back :) It isn't about the hardware, it all comes down to ongoing operational costs and deployment costs. Softswitch technology saw this same pushback 20 years back. Linux as a business platform saw this same pushback 20 years ago. bitcoin saw this same push back 10 years ago. MSFT CEO said phones without keyboards will never disrupt their 40% market share of Windows Phone OS. The only way to block a disruptive technology is via FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt).