Open-RAN – More than a Network Makeover

At the  21^st Voice&Data Telecom Leadership Forum, held on March 22, 2022, the session on Open-RAN and Journey of Network Enterprises, had the following panellists: Dr Raj Kumar Upadhyay, Executive Director, C-Dot; KS Rao, Chief Corporate Officer, STL; Arun Karna, MD, CEO, AT&T India and Rohit Chaudhari, Field CTO, Telco Vertical, HPE India.

The session moderator was Faisal Kawoosa, Founder & Chief Analyst, TechArc.

Open RAN is empowering networks. The key points addressed by panellists were: how will OpenRAN bring cost advantages, improve agility, align with 5G, security and SDN.

Dr. Raj Kumar Upadhyay said, “open networks means open standards and community hardware”. Proprietary solutions lead to vendor lock in. With OpenRAN, the options for plug and play increases – different vendors with better components can work together. It allows for disaggregation of hardware and software. This disaggregation is happening in multiple ways. Multiple vendors and interfaces work together to create new solutions. Hardware dependency is reduced. OpenRAN allows you to run the solution on bare metal, containerise and virtualise. New innovations like AI and ML come into play now. Network performance will be better – costs will be lower and new revenue opportunities will be unlocked.

Would Open RAN complement 5G though?

KS Rao of STL felt that technology disruptions and 5G are creating their own space.

These are very interesting times for people who want to move to open source technologies. We have seen how disintegrating hardware and software in the PC industry broke vendor lock-in and also improved cost-effectiveness. We believe the same thing will happen with Open RAN specially with wireless networks

“OpenRAN is gaining traction because it makes future networks very agile and TCO-efficient,” Mr Rao said.

OpenRAN has received attention in the last few years - especially greenfield wireless service providers who adopted it have shown progress – in Japan and the US. At the same time brownfield (existing) operators are also showing interest. They cannot, however, make an overnight shift.

On the role of SDN in OpenRAN solutions, Arun Karna, MD, CEO, AT&T India said: It’s all about greater intelligence in networks, maximising performance and reducing costs.

“How do you contain costs  as complexity of networks grow. Proliferation of IoT and Cloud environments are creating far-more dispersed enterprises than what we had before. This is where the power of SDN becomes useful. It brings in simplification of networks and agility.

With flexible architectures it enables Enterprises to be more responsive to fast-changing needs of consumers and market opportunities. It removes the complexity in architecture. It enables elasticity which helps to handle high traffic - reducing congestion through intelligent automation.

Intelligent networks can connect to the Cloud and allows payments based on use. The real power lies in virtualisation of networks. How to treat data as separate from physical network – this abstraction helps enterprises a lot. Also allow prioritisation of key applications.”

Arun Karna was of the view that Open RAN can help address many challenges including scale of economy, connectivity to rural areas, owing to lower costs. Brownfield operators are contemplating appropriate ways to transition. For a country like India, Open RAN provides a tremendous opportunity for service and manufacturing industries.

Stumbling Blocks Ahead

There are bumps in the road too.

If we look at the legacy brownfield operators they will have reasons for a phased investment. “It requires a lot of ecosystem development- where Telcos and companies have to work together. It requires capable and knowledgeable System Integrators who can integrate these components. The next level of 5G investments would be huge, and we can expect about 10 to 15 per cent of this to go towards encouragement of new technologies like Open RAN. India can be the 5G open source ecosystem supplier to the global market.”

The panel also discussed security.

Security is critical for players, customers and regulators said Arun Karna. Network and security are not separate discussions anymore. There is a convergence between NetworkOps and SecOps. Software-centric, cloud-networking and security are the big shifts. Locations outside data centres need to have a unified security and low-latency access. “The modern hyper-distributed enterprise will need a user-centric, dynamic, elastic, multi-access and SASE-powered network, he said.”

OpenRAN brings in multiple vendors – that’s a challenge. “Standards bodies and ecosystems are working to define interfaces and reduce interoperability problems. I am sure the whole ecosystem will come together and see innovation in this area.”.

Rohit Chaudhari, Field CTO, Telco Vertical, HPE India had the following views:

“We are playing a big role in the Telco space with pre-validated and pre-configured systems with reference architecture. Learning from our experience in 3G and 4G deployments, we started looking at the Open RAN space. With a production level deployment for a tier-1 US operator we had a lot of learnings. Unlike IT, networks are heavily dependent on latency and hardware. Our reference architecture helps to pick and choose various network components – this boosts the disaggregation confidence.