Telecommunication operators are actively making progress toward understanding the importance of open network concepts but continue to run into implementation challenges that could be preventing them from achieving a greater financial return on their immense 5G investments.

This dilemma was highlighted by a recent Analysys Mason “Open Network Index,” which was commissioned by Dell Technologies and included results from a survey of 50 tier-1 operators. That survey found nearly all respondents believe open networks are critical to their survival. However, only two in 10 have an open network strategy in place.

“We are seeing that operators are really interested in building this more disaggregated and more open interfaces and more horizontal kind of network clouds for their 5G and potentially 6G networks. So interest and understanding is there,” Gorkem Yigit, research director at Analysys Mason, said in an interview. “But what we found out in this exercise was they are still struggling to realize these ambitions.”

Yigit noted that these struggles are linked and range from getting executive leadership to buy in on a project, challenges in explaining the latest technology and architectural changes to those leaders for that buy-in, and then having the people in place to execute these deep digital transformation-like projects.

Those operators that have moved most aggressively down this horizontal network cloud architecture path are “the usual suspects” that in many cases have already started to implement this architecture. Think operators like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile US, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone.

These are operators that have embraced Analysys Mason’s definition of open networks.

“Open networks apply proven cloud concepts to the networking domain while enabling components to be sourced from a broad ecosystem of vendors,” the analyst firm posits. “Open networks boast high levels of automation and programmability and are built around the concept of utilizing a common, horizontal cloud platform that supports cloud-native network functions from multiple vendors and from multiple network domains. Operators can enhance the flexibility, agility, composability, innovation and operational efficiency of their networks by implementing open architectures and open operating models.”

These concepts can support 5G standalone (SA) services, open radio access network (RAN) and virtualized RAN (vRAN) systems and open API platforms running on top of this network architecture.

Open network buy-in Some operators are overcoming potential struggles by fully embracing open architectures. Yigit pointed to historical precedence of a lack of C-level buy in toward dooming game-changing efforts.

“We saw this in NFV in the past,” Yigit said. “It failed because it was just considered as a special project, but it wasn't well connected to how we are going to sell these services, what should the product managers do and the commercial side of things. So many dots need to be connected in the organization to be able to get this.”

That buy-in is also a generational challenge for telecom operators that often have high-level engineers with extensive industry history and knowledge, but a legacy view that could inhibit an ability to trust and adopt new platforms.

“It's really difficult to execute something like this with 50-, 60-year-old network engineers who just know traditional telecom,” Yigit said. “It's a massive mindset change because it's not about telco network technologies anymore, it's about the cloud, which is really overtaking the networks.”

Finding the right partners Some of these challenges can be surmounted by operators selecting the right vendor partners to help down this transition. This can be especially important for operators that might lack the technical expertise in house to deal with these complex architectural initiatives.

Yigit said this could apply to some tier-2 operators “that might be more interested in giving control to someone else because it just makes more sense for them to outsource rather than trying to build everything in house themselves.”

Larger operators are more likely to take on a bigger role in these projects, which builds on their already established history of designing, building and running telecom networks.

“We are seeing operators still considering themselves as engineering companies, and for them network is still their business. They're not going to relinquish the control over the networks and operations,” Yigit said. “But we are seeing some that still want to be in charge, but they need someone from outside to come and plug those gaps, and they want to learn from them.”

Yigit noted that operators can also help themselves through this challenge by expanding their interactions with trade groups outside of the telecom silo. This includes moving beyond what have historically been the large groups that have been focused on traditional telecom topics.

“[Operators] do have high level engagements, mainly on the traditional initiatives like 3GPP, TMForum, traditional telco kind of mindsets,” Yigit said. “But when we look at the ones that focus on more open networks, open clouds and things like that, the difference is quite huge.”

This outside-of-telecom focus can include open-leaning organizations like the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which have increased their outreach on telecom initiatives.

Yigit added that this challenge does come back to “the people who understand these technologies, who can engage with these communities in a much more efficient way because they already have people who understand the TMForum and things like that.”