The move toward open radio access network (RAN) deployments has the potential to unlock operational opportunities for telecom operators, but Manish Singh, CTO for Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business (TSB), thinks simplicity is key to spreading this opportunity.

Singh, in an interview with SDxCentral, noted greenfield open RAN deployments by operators like Dish Network and Rakuten Mobile have shown the opportunity and challenges of current open RAN standards, but also highlight greater challenges for legacy operators.

“It's clear that for the greenfields, whether it's a Dish Network or others who don't have the legacy baggage, it's much easier for them to really start deploying the networks with open RAN. It's a clean state for them,” Singh said. “But for operators who have a lot of legacy infrastructure, first and foremost in the challenges from a technology side is the need for support for legacy technology. In particular, in some parts of the world they even need to support 2G. There are challenges around that.”

Singh explained that those challenges are currently tied to an overwhelming number of options both vendors and operators have in terms of customizing open RAN equipment and software to fit a particular environment.

“I think if you look from a standards perspective, now there are too many options that are getting included. And I really think there's an area of opportunity for O-RAN [Alliance] and to drive more industry alignment up front,” Singh said. “There will always be some options and I get that. But I think there is need to reduce the number of options that are getting documented in the specs because there's a downstream cost to it … and it's both integration and interoperability.”

This integration challenge was highlighted by Analysys Mason, which noted in a recent report that integration challenges continue to stifle growth, with system integrators (SIs) finding issues in getting equipment from different vendors to work seamlessly.

“Having multiple vendors in a single network requires complex testing and optimization, and significantly expands the role of the integrator, creating opportunities for vendor-neutral SIs but new challenges for operators,” Analysys Mason Senior Analyst James Kirby wrote. “These challenges relate to technical scope, but also vendor/operator communication, problem resolution and after-service support.”

These integration challenges also continue to stymie open RAN momentum.

Dell’Oro Group recently made its first downward revision to open RAN market growth. The firm said it now expects open RAN equipment to account for between 15% and 20% of the global RAN market by 2027, which is 5% to 10% less than it had been expecting.

The firm remains bullish on the space but admits that deployment realities are becoming more evident.

“We can think of this revision more as a near-term calibration than a change in the long-term growth trajectory,” Stefan Pongratz, VP and analyst at Dell’Oro Group, noted in a report. “This journey of ‘re-shaping’ the RAN was never expected to be smooth and many challenges remain. Even so, our long-term position has not changed. We continue to believe that open RAN is here to stay, and the growing support by the incumbent suppliers bolsters this thesis.”

Most of the open RAN standards work has been accomplished through the O-RAN Alliance organization, which has been tasked with the tall ask of being the intermediary for open RAN feature requests. This includes the release of a new open fronthaul interface that took deep work from Ericsson and Qualcomm, with the latter stating plans to integrate this work into commercial 5G products starting next year.

Singh applauded the work O-RAN Alliance has been able to accomplish within this large structure, but sees an opportunity for the group to provide more upfront guidance that could result in a more coherent end specification.

“There is opportunity for them to do a lot more alignment of what goes in the spec upfront as part of that sausage making, rather than just documenting all the different options and then leaving that work more for downstream integration,” Singh said.

“What this will translate to is the industry will have to define and probably the vendors and the operators will start to define their own interoperability profiles. And I know O-RAN Alliance has had some of these interoperability profiles defined. I think that probably will then be the way to resolve all these options. That's how I see it and that's why I think there's an area of opportunity here for O-RAN Alliance.”