Open radio access network (RAN) technology remains a great idea in theory, promising telecom operators countless vendors all vying to supply an easier to manage and deploy aspect of the most costly and complicated nature of a mobile network, however that theory continues to be challenged by ongoing complexity concerns.

Operators have slowly begun to deploy open RAN components, though the overall “openness” of those deployments remain a point of contention. Many of those initial installs have revolved around a very limited number of vendors highlighting concerns over interoperability and “carrier-grade” performance, but those challenges have started to ebb.

“Having the ability to pick and choose vendors based on their capabilities and knowing that they can interoperate on either side of that equation and yield high performance, high quality, low cost, whatever your goal is, for the network,” Adam Koeppe, senior VP of technology planning at Verizon, told SDxCentral late last year as part of that carrier launching a multivendor open RAN distributed antenna system (DAS). That system was deployed at the University of Texas in Austin and the Austin Convention Center using equipment from Samsung and CommScope running on top of its edge-focused virtualized cloud architecture.

“In this case, you’ve got a Samsung component and you’ve got a CommScope component in the DAS system, so that hasn’t been done before. It represents, really, the true spirit, if you will, of [open] RAN where you have two vendors in that supplier system on either ends of that,” Koeppe added.

This level of trust was echoed by Eben Albertyn, CTO for Boost Mobile, who during a “fireside chat” at the recent CCA Mobile Carriers Show shot down open RAN complexity concerns.

“The perception that I pick up sometimes when I speak to the industry is that open RAN is not mature,” Albertyn said. “As I've explained, the other three have been optimizing that network for about 30 years now. We've been at it for about a year and a half and we've beaten them on quality in the biggest city in the world, in New York City. So open RAN is real and it's not as technical as people think. It's a very mature technology.”

Albertyn did admit that Boost Mobile struggled through the initial deployment, hindered by it being one of the first in the world to push a greenfield cloud-native deployment. But, the move has allowed the carrier to be more aggressive in vendor management.

“I think open RAN and the technologies that we’ve used goes far and beyond just that of the radio, it changes the entire way of interacting with your supply chain and your landscape, and there is a lot more control that allows you to manipulate cost and quality in a way that suits your situation,” Albertyn said. “We didn’t want to go through all of these pains. We didn’t want to go through these changes, but we were, I think, extremely grateful that we had the opportunity to change at will when you’re in the situation changed.”

Those changes included having to become the de-facto systems integrator (SI) for its own network deployment, which it initially wanted to have its vendors deal with.

“We were of the conviction that we could go into this journey with the use of partners, and they would actually help us to do most of the heavy lift. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. We actually crashed-and-burned completely,” Albertyn explained. “We had to become the systems integrator ourselves. We had to become an architect and the creator of the underlying infrastructure of the network itself. And we had to become the hub of the spokes around. That was a surprise and a huge slap in the face. We realized that the route that we fashioned was a complete dead end.”

Ongoing open RAN security concerns Despite the progress, not all are fully ready to sign off on open RAN.

Analysys Mason in a recent operator survey found ongoing concerns over deeper levels of open RAN complexity. Specifically, the analyst firm found one-third of operators think open RAN will make security management harder, though it should also be noted that another one-third of respondents expressed the opposite opinion.

“Such contradicting opinions about open RAN security are common,” James Kirby, senior analyst at Analysys Mason, write. “For example, some pundits claim that the increased number of open interfaces will pose a considerable security challenge while others argue that proprietary interfaces are not necessarily more secure and that the greater visibility into open RAN architectures makes vulnerabilities and threats easier to spot. Given that security failings can lead to hefty fines and reputational damage for operators, this uncertainty is contributing to slowed open RAN adoption.”

Kirby added that it’s imperative for the industry to work on better open RAN security standardization in order to alleviate concerns.

“To drive progress toward widespread, at-scale commercial adoption of multi-vendor open RAN (and support ecosystem diversity) it is imperative that progress is made to build confidence in its security and reduce its related operational burden,” Kirby states. “Critically, the industry must advance standardization with a goal to reach recognized security certifications that can create consistency in the ecosystem and de-risk and reduce the burden of multi-vendor security for operators.”

Can AI help? Some in the industry think a dash of artificial intelligence (AI) could help bridge this security and management gap. Analysts have pointed to the benefits AI can bring to the deployment and management of cloud-based open RAN networks, which are more complex orchestration challenges due to the disaggregated multivendor ecosystem. The use of AI could help close performance gaps for open RAN architectures compared with legacy RAN models.

While there may be some concern over the impact a growing focus on AI might have on the broader open RAN, Boost Mobile’s Albertyn remains convinced they will both help propel the market.

“Open RAN and what people are calling AI-RAN are not competitive to each other. They're orthogonal to each other,” Albertyn said. “And because of how open RAN works and how it's been put together, it is far easier to introduce AI components into open RAN.”