(L-R): Julie Kub, 5G Challenge project leader; Ted Woodward, technical director FutreG and 5G Office, Department of Defense; David Debrecht, VP wireless technologies, CableLabs; David Zufall, VP wireless development, Dish Network; Alex Choi, chairman, O-RAN Alliance.

Open radio access network (RAN) technology is one of the hottest topics in the telecom space despite ongoing development and integration challenges that have limited most deployments to greenfield 5G operators. This division was highlighted at the recent MWC Las Vegas event where technology executives from large operators had significantly different views on open RAN maturity, which continues to dampen uptake.

LightCounting Market Research recently noted the market was “softening and pointing to flatness through 2025” due to a lag in deployment timing between early adopters like Rakuten Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and Dish Network, and most brownfield operators that remain on the sideline waiting for the specification to mature.

Efforts to minimize interoperability concerns were at the heart of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently completed 5G Challenge event. The event provided $7 million in “prize money” for vendors showing multi-vendor interoperability across radio units (RUs) and combined central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs).

David Zufall, VP wireless infrastructure development at Dish Network, explained during a panel discussion tied to the disbursement of those funds held at testing provider CableLabs that the carrier initially struggled with piecing together the disparate parts of a network that open RAN provides.

“Management of the overall structure was an area that we struggled with,” Zufall said. “How can we make sure that the entire software distribution system is clean, that we’ve got the ability to manage all the individual vendors.”

This sentiment echoed what Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen stated last year when the operator was beginning to run into deployment deadlines tied to the carrier’s licensed spectrum holdings.

“We’re six months behind where we thought we’d be, and it’s my fault,” Ergen said during a Dish Network earnings call. “We just didn’t maybe anticipate that we would have to do as much on the technical side. Ultimately we found that we had to become the system integrator. It wasn’t a role that we thought we were going to take on. But with all the vendors, somebody’s got to be the middleman between them and be the glue that holds them together.”

Zufall explained that the ecosystem can help address this issue with more focus on setting minimum standards that vendors need to adhere to before their equipment is installed into a network. The O-RAN Alliance has been a focal point of these efforts, but real-world deployments have shown that operators might need to take more control on these efforts in the near term.

“I think that’s going to be up to [operators] to force it among our vendors,” Zufall said. “We can define the basic layers, that it’s going to be a cloud-native environment and we have our principles, so I think we can define the environment. But I think we have to take the bold step and say ‘I am going to have a multi-vendor network and I am going to have a multi-cloud network and I’m not just going to use somebody’s middleware to enable the interoperability that happens to work on both of them. We were willing to do it on the RAN and we saved some money. We’re willing to do it on hardware, but we have to go to the next step, and I think that’s on the operator community to kind of force it across our vendors.”

That “middleware” step Zufall mentioned has been highlighted by the growing push by vendors like Red Hat and its OpenShift platform and VMware with its Telco Cloud Platform in tying together those hardware and software layers using a easier to control interface. These have been used by many vendors and cloud providers to offload those final interconnectivity efforts, which Zufall said has hindered true interoperability efforts.

“Everybody mentions Ericsson and Nokia, to use the big names: they have the same problems internally with their boxes that don’t all talk nicely together, so it’s not like it’s solved if you just don’t go to [open RAN],” Zufall said. “We have to look at it and say this is a problem. If we are going to make better networks we need to fix it and not look to take a step backwards and say this is not a reason for not moving toward an [open RAN] environment.”

David Debrecht, VP of wireless technologies at CableLabs, echoed that thinking, noting that the industry should continue to aim for true “plug-and-play” interoperability for open RAN components, though those efforts could bleed into the next wireless technology iteration.

“If you are going to shoot for the moon then shoot for the moon. Don’t shoot for halfway to the moon,” Debrecht said. “I think it is achievable, I just don’t think it’s going to be something that’s going to happen right away. It’s going to take some time.”

How much time? Maybe another decade.

“What I've been saying, typically, when I get that question is 6G,” Debrecht said on his opinion of when open RAN would become the dominant RAN path. “I think 6G is when it becomes the norm. So is that eight years from now? Is it six years from now? Is it 10 years from now? I can't say, but I think it's really going to become the norm when that next generation of architecture happens.”