AT&T this week took the next step on its open radio access network (RAN) journey and added Dell Technologies as a vendor partner, but those steps come on the heels of a highly publicized AT&T network outage, which could overhang ongoing network upgrades.

The carrier this week began deploying Ericsson’s Cloud RAN technology on its commercial 5G network at a location south of Dallas. This involved migrating one of AT&T’s C-band frequencies to the Cloud RAN infrastructure, which is now supporting commercial traffic.

AT&T and Ericsson also completed a test call across the commercial Cloud RAN infrastructure and stated “third-party vendors will be able to use this configuration for open RAN in the future.”

The deployment comes just a few months after AT&T announced its extensive open RAN plans. Those plans call for Ericsson to be the base of an extensive multiyear, $14 billion open RAN deployment across the carrier’s nationwide network, with the goal of having 70% of its wireless network traffic flowing through its open RAN platform by the end of 2026.

Ericsson was a somewhat controversial choice for the operator as the vendor has not been viewed as a leader in the open RAN space, but the vendor does have an incumbent advantage.

“They have 65% of the network,” Rob Soni, VP of RAN technology at AT&T, told SDxCentral of Ericsson’s foothold in AT&T’s wireless network architecture. “They also have the scale to be able to accomplish and I think one of the challenges that we have with some of the newer non-incumbent RAN vendors is that they need a scale platform to build off of as opposed to building totally from scratch.”

Some of Ericsson’s rivals have questioned the true openness of its platforms and the ability for Ericsson to act as an overall systems-integrator for this open RAN deployment. Soni repeatedly stated that AT&T’s open RAN work remains in-progress.

“We continue to do experiments with key partners both in the application side, as well as on the platform side, and we’ll continue that through the lifecycle of this deal and Ericsson will support us with that in general,” Soni said.

AT&T has named Fujitsu as an additional open RAN equipment provider.

During a keynote address at the MWC Barcelona 2024 event this week, Chris Sambar, head of network at AT&T, added Dell Technologies to its open RAN program. Sambar, conveniently standing onstage alongside Dell Chairman Michael Dell, explained the carrier has “a whole bunch of network infrastructure there and over time we would like to migrate a significant portion of that to this open disaggregated future.”

“We've done a great job with open disaggregated networks and virtualizing our networks in different parts of the network, but this is going to be a bit of a new journey for us,” Sambar said to Dell. “True cloud principles, injecting them into a wireless network at scale for a brownfield operator, and you've done this across multiple industries over the years. You and Dell and others have been a true visionary, so we're really counting on you in partnership with Ericsson and others to help us walk down this path. We think there's going to be tremendous benefits.”

The Dell announcement came just days after the vendor updated its telecom-focused infrastructure with new automation and support bundles. These include its Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite software that automates the deployment and management of multivendor deployments and deeper Red Hat integration for Dell’s Telecom Infrastructure Blocks portfolio.

Sambar’s announcement also came just days after AT&T suffered a nationwide network outage that has so far been blamed on “application and execution of an incorrect process used while working to expand our network.” The carrier did notably state that the outage “was not a cyberattack.”

Sambar quickly addressed the issue on stage at the MWC event, though did not provide any greater detail as to the cause.

“We let some of our customers down Thursday of last week; I'm sure some of you in the audience and some listening out there on the web,” Sambar said. “So want to deeply apologize to start with. We can do better than that. We will do better than that.”

The outage appeared to have impacted all traffic moving across AT&T’s mobile network, including its consumer, enterprise and government customers. Those government customers include AT&T’s First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet) public safety network.

Forrester analysts noted in a blog post that the outage lasted approximately 11 hours “and, based on the impacts of similar outages in the past on areas such as financial transactions and supply chains, we estimate the impact to the U.S. economy at $500 million.”

While the outage has not been directly connected to any specific AT&T network upgrades, the Forrester blog post noted “there will be investigations and significant costs to AT&T … and, ultimately, its customers.”

“A chain of events will unfold following the outage, starting with AT&T submitting the official outage root cause report to the FCC [Federal Communications Commission],” the post said. “In parallel, U.S. government agencies will support efforts to rule out any possible cyberattacks.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has so far not released an official statement on the outage, though it did note it was awarded a “Technology & Engineering Emmy Award” by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Forrester estimates AT&T could see up to $1.5 billion in costs associated with the outage.

Looking ahead, Forrester says organizations need to accelerate their investment in tools such as monitoring, visibility, observability and artificial intelligence (AI). These then need to be tied together to help reduce the chance of an outage or at least reduce the time of an outage.

“Automation and AI won’t eliminate every outage, but it can help uncover and avoid many outages and performance degradations while running simulations before changes or issues,” the post said.