Still, a long way to go for Open RAN to prove its full potential

• The telecom industry is already witnessing constructive competition between mobile vendors, operators, and chipset and cloud providers, with several ongoing partnerships to become a commercial reality.
• ABI Research believes that RIC will be a make-or-break feature for Open RAN to become a 6G product.
• The industry needs to start developing the RIC ecosystem to enable the full potential of Open RAN architecture.

A technology gap still exists between legacy RAN and Open RAN in terms of higher order and large-scale mMIMO deployments.

Small-scale Open RAN deployments have already started in 2023 and large-scale brownfield deployments are expected to kick off during the first half of 2024.

The Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) ecosystem is developing and the industry is already witnessing constructive competition between mobile vendors, operators, chipset and cloud providers, with several ongoing partnerships to become a commercial reality.

After extensive research, Proofs of Concept (PoCs), trials, and certification processes that took almost a half-decade since the O-RAN Alliance was established in 2018, Open RAN is now slowly becoming a commercial reality.

The Open RAN ecosystem and supply chain started to become established during 2023 with several mobile operators, along with mobile vendors, having started small-scale commercial Open RAN deployments.

Related Posts:

• Enterprise business and cloud services to fuel more growth for Ericsson and Nokia
• What are Radio Unit, Distributed Units and Centralised Units in Open RAN functional split?
• Open RAN Explainer: Why do interfaces need to be open?

Several equipment vendors have implemented organic and inorganic growth strategies by launching new products, software upgrades, partnerships, and Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) to broaden their Open RAN offerings in the market.

These include Mavenir, Nokia, NEC Corporation, Ericsson, Samsung, Fujitsu, Parallel Wireless, Rakuten, etc. On top of that, all major chipset providers (Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Marvell, etc.) have joined this competition by announcing several products and partnerships with major mobile vendors and operators.

Considering the ongoing paradigm shift from traditional RAN toward vRAN and cloud-native Open RAN, the mobile industry is adopting O-RAN Alliance standards and has started to compete in the market and 2023 has proven to be a year full of advanced Open RAN developments.

Open RAN: A step forward

However, Saqlain Ali, Senior Analyst on the 5G & Mobile Network Infrastructure team at ABI Research, said that there is still a long way to go for Open RAN to prove its full potential as an E2E solution by combining all the RAN components, including the Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), Centralised Unit (CU), Distributed Unit (DU), RAN intelligent Controller (RIC, the brain of open RAN), and Radio Unit (RU), and their integration with core networks and other existing technologies, including MEC, Network Slicing (NS) and Self-Organising Networks (SONs).

“Open RAN is not restricted to any particular generation of mobile networks; instead, the industry should expect to observe implementations across different “Gs” and consider Open RAN as a step forward toward the next generations of mobile networks.”

However, he said that there are still other promising features that need further development and full integration with Open RAN.

Game changer

“A technology gap still exists between legacy RAN and Open RAN in terms of higher order and large-scale mMIMO deployments. Small-scale Open RAN deployments have already started in 2023 and large-scale brownfield deployments are expected to kick off during the first half of 2024,” Ali said.

However, he said that this will happen without RIC and ‘the game changer’ that can bring further advantages, including automation, agility, and efficiency for mobile operators to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Maturing the RIC programmability is critically important to help mobile operators fulfil their network requirements, he said and added that more work is needed across various domains of the RIC ecosystem such as the integration of multiple RICs and scalability; testing and integration of rApps and xApps in multi-vendor environments; conflict mitigation between xApps/rApps; and security.

“The industry needs to start developing the RIC ecosystem to enable the full potential of Open RAN architecture. Few vendors have already developed their versions of a RIC, but significant collaboration is needed to avoid unbalanced and incompatible development of technology,” Ali said.

ABI Research believes that the RIC will be a make-or-break feature for Open RAN to become a 6G product.