The number of communities pushing open radio access network (RAN) technology is growing at a faster rate than large-scale deployments. NTT DoCoMo earlier this month became the latest to form a new group tasked with fostering the development of open RAN.

The Japanese operator’s 5G Open RAN Ecosystem initiative includes many of the same vendors involved in other open RAN communities, including the O-RAN Alliance, Telecom Infra Project (TIP), Open RAN Policy Coalition, the Open Network Foundation’s (ONF) SD-RAN project, and others. It also comes just weeks after Europe’s four largest multinational operators linked up to support open RAN as “the technology of choice for future mobile networks.”

These groups overlap more than they differ, but the proliferation of open RAN communities, some more formal than others, indicates how difficult it is for vendors to coalesce and meet divergent interests with a relatively young technology. 

Competing motivations are abundant in open RAN, and most of these groups are shoving the technology in a direction that best serves the goals of those leading the charge. 

NTT DoCoMo shared few details about its effort, but it did single out the need to achieve a level of performance across multiple vendors and ongoing issues with interoperability and testing. Like most burgeoning technologies, support from industry leaders is almost as important as the advancement of the technology itself, but it’s clear that most early supporters of open RAN aren’t sufficiently content with the technology as it stands today.

“The challenge is just keeping straight what everybody’s doing,” Daryl Schoolar, practice leader at Omdia, told SDxCentral. 

The O-RAN Alliance is working to create specifications, TIP’s OpenRAN project is focused on creating commercial use cases, ONF is zeroing in on the near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (nRT-RIC), and different operator-led groups are peeling off to grow their own ecosystem of suppliers for open RAN to their liking, Schoolar explained. 

Multiple cross-alliance partnerships have been struck in the open RAN space, but consolidation is still probably years away, if at all. 

“All these different people have different areas and different strengths that they play in,” but NTT has the power and influence to bring multiple vendors together in a way that smaller players don’t, Schoolar said. Operators face and adhere to different requirements in each market, and NTT is “very demanding in terms of how the network performs,” he added. 

NTT DoCoMo’s open RAN group, which includes 12 companies, can be viewed as an Asia Pacific counter to what other communities are doing in Europe and North America, but it’s also pushing multiple vendors to achieve a level of performance and interoperability that may not be as strict in other markets, Schoolar explained. 

While there are variances by market, Open RAN also presents the same challenges globally, specifically “increased complexity with integration and a new set of participants in a highly disaggregated model,” Will Townsend, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SDxCentral.

“A lot of this stuff still is immature,” Schoolar said. “They’ve created specifications and all of that, but until you start to deploy a lot, and it scales with different operators in different markets and different combinations, it’s still remains immature because you’re not always sure how to get two vendors to talk properly, so the interoperability still has to be worked on.”

Indeed, integration across the open RAN ecosystem is “still a big issue because one operator may have a different mix of vendors from another mix, and the vendors may interpret some of the specifications differently,” he added.

While the number of communities targeting open RAN is growing, Schoolar said that’s to be expected and he doesn’t view that splintering of efforts as a discouraging sign because the camps aren’t outwardly fighting each other. 

“I don’t think everybody’s totally lined up on what they want the network to do,” he said. “But overall, I think the market is progressing well. I still believe it’s going to take a while for it to grow. I don’t think it’s going to change overnight. I think most of the opportunity is with brownfield [operators] and those will take longer to deploy because you have to make sure it doesn’t degrade your existing network and how it operates with all that.”

Omdia’s latest forecast for open RAN puts it above 10% of the total RAN market by 2024.