Open radio access network (RAN) architecture enjoys a simple premise with complicated caveats — ones that require an understanding or acceptance that not everything can be truly open in a wireless network environment.

While this seemingly contradictory admission might muddy the perception of what open RAN can deliver, it’s important for the industry to coalesce around actual outcomes and objectives, above platitudes and hype. 

Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth is on a mission to cut through this noise, or as he put it, avoid “getting caught up in a religion of is it open or not?”

There’s a more important acknowledgement lying under the surface, according to Hollingworth. 

“You can do open RAN and you can end up in a much better place in terms of performance and cost structure. But you can also end up in a much worse place,” he said. 

“If you decide to diversify your supply chain and have a lot of different moving parts, but you do not understand how to industrially automate that into an operation, then it doesn’t work well. And there’s nothing unique about that in telecom. It’s the same in any industry,” Hollingworth added. 

“We have invested a tremendous amount of money in that industrialized automation process. That means that people don’t have to reinvent stuff,” he said.

His comments follow a growing view among industry analysts that Rakuten Symphony is effectively a walled garden, or a closed ecosystem within and of itself.  The Japanese ecommerce giant’s foray into open RAN technology positions Rakuten Symphony as a marketplace of commoditized hardware and pre-integrated and validated software that other operators can select and deploy.

It’s the most expansive open RAN ecosystem developed to date, but multiple analysts conclude it fails to meet the full vision of open RAN precisely because of that. “It’s their ecosystem, so it is not, I don’t think it’s the truest definition of open RAN per se,” Mike Thelander, president and founder of Signals Research Group, said during a panel at Mobile World Congress 2022 in Barcelona.

Much of the debate centers around the extent to which Rakuten and other open RAN vendors adhere to openness. There remains a significant disconnect with respect to what open RAN represents and how it should be defined. 

Monica Paolini, founder and principal analyst at Senza Fili, suggests open RAN represents a new way of thinking about RAN that goes beyond open interfaces. It’s a broader view, but also one that could be met by a single vendor if open interfaces are allowed.

“There is a conflation of what open means,” Hollingworth wrote in a recent post on LinkedIn. “In our context, open RAN means open interfaces, not open software. … Open RAN is about defining open interfaces for software interoperability.”

Rakuten Symphony is undoubtedly more flexible and dynamic than if an operator picked a traditional RAN vendor as its exclusive equipment and software provider, but it only meets that mark insofar as specific software stacks are approved and included in its marketplace. 

Hollingworth contends there will always, regardless of the industry or architecture involved, be some authority that decides if another piece of software can work successfully in tandem with an existing system. 

“The approach that we are taking in Rakuten is now we are working really at a software delivery level,” he explained. “On the software level, we are pulling the software in and then making sure it works, and then automating it, and then making it available to everyone else. That is a much more effective supply chain that opens up much more optionality for the customers to choose from.”

The IT industry at large, and RAN specifically, typically assign pre-integration activities under one supplier. That framework “worked really well, but now there’s only three suppliers and there’s no motivation for innovation,” Hollingworth said. 

“What we are doing is doing integration at the point of consumption because it’s software, because we can do that now," he added.