The Mobile NetworkStick, Slip, Slide: Telecom Open RAN Commitments

A busy week for operators learning about Open RAN plans.

At Informa’s NetworkX event in Paris, an Open RAN panel heard from Orange and STC on their plans for Open RAN adoption, as well as a dedicated session from Telus.

Stick

Orange said that from 2025, every RAN tender will include a requirement to support the Open RAN interface. The panel’s moderator, Heavy Reading analyst Gabriel Brown, urged Atoosa Hatefi: Director of Innovation in Radio and EnvironmentOrange, on the operator’s commitments in 2021, said 2025 would be the year it mandated support for Open RAN. Hatefi said: Yes, from next year interoperability will be a must in all procurement processes.

“We planned it and it’s good to see we can achieve it,” she said.

Orange was already happy with the 2T2R and 4T4R products, but Hatefi said it is now also encouraged by its work on Massive MIMO, meaning it expects to have dense urban Massive MIMO Open RAN products by 2026 could support from a single server. One reason for this development was the advancement of chipset development – particularly with Intel’s Sapphire Rapids platform.

Slide

Another operator that mentioned Sapphire Rapids was STC Saif Alajaji – Senior Consultant, Technology Strategy and Architecture. Alajaji said the operator will launch production of Open RAN in the fourth quarter of 2024, although this may move into the first quarter of 2025 after a “busy year” brought about by an RFI in 2022 and RFPs in 2023. He again added his support features of products based on the Intel Saphhire Rapids chip platform.

The Saudi operator aims to have around 70% of its Open RAN sites centrally operated and 30% distributed. It announced its provider selection in February of this year. STC partners with Mavenir for Open Radios and cloud-native RAN capabilities. To host the containerized RAN and automation workloads, new edge data centers will be established in collaboration with RedHat, Dell and Cisco. It uses a Juniper automation layer that includes a Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC near real-time and non-real-time) and an SMO (Service & Management Orchestrator) with AI/ML-based x/r apps, both in-house and from Airhop.

Slip

At our own capital market day DT said there will be an estimated 3,000 Open RAN sites in 2027, a departure from the original expectation of 3,000 sites in 2026. In its presentation, the company admitted that Open RAN has developed more slowly than expected. This appears to circumvent DT’s own role in providing impetus for Open RAN deployments. The operator certainly did not lack for trials and PoCs with various Open RAN providers.

But now the company is targeting 2027 as the year it will bring its own automated RAN management software to market and operational, and is incorporating the same RAN management platform into its Open RAN rollout schedule. The need for an independent RAN management layer arose from DT’s agreement with the German government to keep Huawei radios on their network as long as the configuration management capability was independent. This required opening the Huawei radio layer to an overlying controller. In fact, DT was already exploring an Open RAN SMO and Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) layer, both internally and in various trials with Nokia and VMWare.

What DT will now do is advance this SMO/RIC capability as a RAN configuration manager that applies to the entire RAN inventory, including all vendors. The government’s actual deadline for this is 2029, but DT has said the RAN manager should be ready by 2027.

Open RAN deployments will also sit under this horizontal RAN management layer, i.e. hIt appears that Open RAN adoption has been slightly paused while the operator works to keep Huawei radios and antennas in an independent RAN management software layer.

Speeding

Meanwhile, about a day earlier in Paris, Telus had confirmed that it was indeed accelerating its Open RAN plans.

The Mobile Network reported on this at the end of September Telus‘ It was recently announced that from now on only O-RAN compatible devices will be installed. The company’s Bernard Bureau stood by an earlier claim that 50% of the operator’s sites would be Open RAN sites by the end of 2027. Where traditional radios remain on towers, a CPRI to eCPRU converter is deployed, interfacing with the O-RAN baseband.

You can read much of the reasoning in this earlier report, but it’s worth noting that Bureau reiterated in its presentation that Telus will actually only use Open RAN from now on.

Good news for Samsung

When asked by TMN if Telus would look for other vRAN providers, Bureau essentially answered no. However, he added that the mere fact that Open RAN could offer the potential for change is enough to keep vendors honest. That’s pretty good news for Samsung, which has tapped Telus’ vRAN business for its Open RAN deployments and now appears to be in a very good position to roll it out across the rest of its network (as long as it stays “honest”).

Bureau previously added that the company chose lookaside acceleration to allow for greater potential flexibility when needed.

Additionally, the company is committed to developing an SMO and RIC capability.

“We are very excited about the automation possibilities that SMO and RIC bring.” And “can’t wait” to get started with a long list of RIC algorithms and applications that its small but talented technical team has put together, with a target date of early 2025.

The company has also merged its O-RAN specialist team with its traditional RAN team, returning to a single organization for RAN planning and deployment.

Finally, KDDI announced an Open RAN compatible rollout with Samsung – which you can read more about here.