- Many enterprises were killed because they did not believe in the tidal wave, Parallel Wireless says
- Many telecom operators are moving to ORAN to cut Capex and Opex.
- ORAN is no longer a new technology and it is live in many networks across the world.
Dubai: Opening the radio access network (RAN) space to new vendors is going to encourage innovation and reduce the Capex and Opex for telecom operators drastically, an industry expert said.
“Open RAN or ORAN is expected to change the ways networks are built and to lower future costs for MNOs. It is driving the need to move from costly and proprietary RAN solutions to open and software-based ones, and to create a broader vendor supply chain,” Amrit Heer, Sales Director for Middle East and North Africa at Parallel Wireless, told TechChannel News in an exclusive interview.
Parallel Wireless is a US-based company challenging the world’s legacy vendors with the industry’s only unified all G (5G/4G/3G/2G) with software-enabled ORAN solution.
“What happened to Microsoft is going to happen to other legacy vendors [Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia] because we see them as vertically integrated, which means that operators cannot mix and match radios with baseband processing unit [BBUs] of other vendors,” he said.
In 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source as a “cancer” on Microsoft’s intellectual property but now, Microsoft president Brad Smith believes the company was wrong about open source and said that Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century.
Microsoft has even joined industry partners to create the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a new cross-industry collaboration hosted at the Linux Foundation.
Heer said the transition is happening in many markets for a while and the first transition, in the telecom space, happened in the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) about 12 years ago.
EPC is a framework for providing converged voice and data on a 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network while 2G and 3G network architectures process and switch voice and data through two separate sub-domains – circuit-switched (CS) for voice and packet-switched (PS) for data.
“RAN is the most profitable for legacy vendors and it is 80 per cent of the Capex and 60 per cent of the Opex while EPCs are only about 15 per cent,” Heer said.
In theory, he said that RAN, built by any of the legacy vendors, is supposed to be interoperable with any device, any core and any transmission network due to its conformance with 3GPP standards.
However, in traditional RAN deployments, he said that the software, hardware and interfaces remain either proprietary or optimised by the individual vendor, which means that telcos cannot put vendor B’s software on a BBU from vendor A.
So, if an operator wants to change it, the operator needs to rip out all of it – from the radio to the BBU hosting the software, he said and added that is what is happening in Europe and the US where operators are forced to remove Huawei from their networks in a few years.
Be in the driver’s seat
“More and more operators see ORAN as the only alternative to get them into the driver’s seat to deploy and manage their networks and don’t want to be locked in into another RAN supplier that will be driving their networks,” Heer said.
Moreover, he said that innovation was not happening as there was no interest for legacy vendors.
Parallel has been working for many years with Vodafone and Telefonica in helping them change and build RAN.
“The first transition took place in the vertical space and the second transition is in the cost of maintaining the legacy networks (2 G, 3G and 4G) for Vodafone and Telefonica.
“We started as a 4G ORAN company but our customers came to us and said they need ORAN for 3G and 2G to bring innovation to their customers and modernise the networks. So, we went backwards to bring the industry forward. We not only disaggregated 4G but also 3G and 2G. So, operators can upgrade directly from 2G to 4G or from 2G to 5G with a simple software upgrade,” Heer said.
When RAN is opened up horizontally, he said that it will bring in a new range of low-cost radio players and gives mobile operators a choice to optimise deployment options for specific performance requirements at a much better cost.
In the next 12 months, he said that Parallel is going to provide a fundamental solution that can replace any existing vendor as there as only two big vendors – Ericsson and Huawei.
“We are reaching that Holy Grail and operators will be able to blindly replace existing vendors with our product portfolio. We are connected to 60 vendors globally,” he said.
The software-enabled ORAN architecture enables a “white box” RAN hardware, which means that baseband units, radio units and remote radio heads can be assembled from any vendor and managed by Open RAN software to form a truly interoperable and open network.
“ORAN is in the networks of many operators and it has live traffic. Our software is in the radio, core networks and connects to any vendor who has 2G, 3G and 4G,” Heer said.
Monolithic blocks can create backdoors
In reply to an Ericsson’s blog about “Making sure that Open RAN doesn’t open the door for new risks in 5G”, he said that they [Parallel] have signed a contract with ESN (Emerging Service Network) in the UK, six years ago, highly secure and highly tested by the UK government.
“We have gone past the ORAN standards over the last five years. Any vertical-integrated company with their one monolithic block is very easy to create backdoors and it is extremely difficult when the architecture is modular,” he said.
Two separate forums were created to define the technical specifications for Open RAN – O-RAN Alliance and Telecom Infra Project (TIP).
TIP’s working groups cover topics including the Open RAN ecosystem, mmWave low-cost hardware, power and connectivity and optical transport.
The O-RAN Alliance, a global community with over 160 companies, focuses on defining a set of open interfaces between the different building blocks of the RAN architecture and defines a new element, the ‘RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC)’, which enables the creation of applications to optimise processes or launch new services.
Nokia and Ericsson are part of the O-RAN Alliance but Huawei, which is an active member of GSMA and 3GPP, is not a member of the O-RAN Alliance.
Ericsson’s name is not mentioned in the launch of the Open RAN Policy Coalition and critics say that Huawei may not be keen to join the policy coalition dominated by the US.
Deployments in Mideast
“Our architecture is fully interoperable and our interface is 3GPP standard. Parallel Wireless’ OpenRAN can support all 3GPP-compliant RAN splits. All big five operators in the Middle East are working with us but are in different stages of ORAN. Etisalat and Zain have been publicly announced. Most of the traffic is still running on 2G, 3G and 4G and 5G is still years away,” Heer said.
Moreover, he said that all of their deployments in the Middle East and North Africa are all on existing core networks and “our controller can connect to any of the technologies of other core vendors”.
Parallel’s ORAN is in 50 mobile operator networks and working with 25 mobile operator groups.
“ORAN tidal wave is here and it is no longer a new technology. All the legacy players can grab a surfboard and start surfing or the tidal wave will swallow them. It has happened to so many companies in the enterprise space as they did not believe in the tidal wave and did not grab the surfboard and so, they died. So, Ericcson needs to grab a surfboard instead of writing a whitepaper trying to discourage ORAN,” he said.
According to research firm Dell’Oro Group, the worldwide sales of virtualised Open RAN technologies are forecasted to grow at double-digit rates over the next five years with cumulative Open RAN investments – including hardware, software, and firmware excluding services – projected to surpass $5 billion over the forecast period.