AT&T’s decision to lean heavily on Ericsson for the carrier’s initial open radio access network (RAN) deployment has raised eyebrows across the ecosystem, but the carrier and some analysts note the move provides AT&T with much-needed certainty and flexibility.

Prior to the deal being announced, Ericsson was not viewed as a leading open RAN vendor. This was due to what many termed a legacy mindset based on a financially secure model of a monolithic network architecture.

Ericsson had recently begun to become more active in the open RAN ecosystem, but many behind the scenes had hinted that the vendor has been dragging its feet and thus as one of the largest telecommunication providers in the world has been hindering broader open RAN adoption.

However, Ericsson's size could not be ignored. Rob Soni, VP of RAN technology at AT&T, told SDxCentral that the carrier’s decision was indeed based on Ericsson’s scale.

“They have 65% of the network,” Soni said of Ericsson’s current foothold into 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 nonincumbent RAN vendors is that they need a scale platform to build off of as opposed to building totally from scratch.”

Ericsson runs at the top of RAN market

Ericsson has repeatedly been ranked as one of the market’s largest RAN vendors, typically duking it out over top honors with China-based Huawei. Ericsson has also been aggressive in rolling out new RAN hardware and software components to further bolster that position.

However, Ericsson has been a much smaller player in the open RAN space, which instead has been dominated by the likes of Samsung, NEC and Fujitsu. AT&T did name Fujitsu as an open RAN radio vendor for its deal.

Ericsson’s scale could also have a financial impact. AT&T executives have downplayed any potential cost savings of the deal, which could see the carrier invest up to $14 billion into open RAN over the next five years, but analysts noted that was likely a component of the decision.

“Buying more and bigger volume from single vendor just gives you better pricing,” Daryl Schoolar, analyst and director at Recon Analytics, said. “Maybe they're happy with the price and that's more important than having more radio vendors, and they can just take the assurance that after using stuff that is open RAN and open RAN-compliant, if they need to bring other vendors in there, there's a roadmap to do so.”

Opening Ericsson to open RAN

Soni said AT&T’s deal is also a big push toward Ericsson becoming a more significant backer of the open RAN ecosystem.

“In order for us to be able to move the ecosystem forward and to continue to create momentum in the ecosystem it meant actually encouraging Ericsson to move more aggressively toward open. I don't know without this deal do they move as aggressively in this direction or not? It's hard to say,” Soni said.

Soni explained that Ericsson’s “open” contributions to AT&T’s network will see the carrier evolve from the Ericsson Network Management (ENM), which is not cloud-based, to the Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP), which is the vendor’s service management and orchestration (SMO) platform. The EIAP will span across multiple domains, including the service level where it can control the cloud RAN and traditional RAN functions, the radios and the hardware.

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.

Open RAN brings flexibility

Monica Paolini, founder and president of analyst and consulting firm Senza Fili, said this level of flexibility is important for operators.

“The reason why open RAN is such a compelling model for RAN evolution is the fact that it gives flexibility, it gives operators the freedom to do whatever they want,” Paolini said. “Whenever I talk to operators that's what they say to me. If they can save money, that's good, but that's not the primary reason for moving to open RAN.”

Paolini said that open RAN deployments, “even in a best-case scenario,” will require “a lot of work in the short term. It’s just not worth it. What is the reason why it’s worth it is because of the long-term benefits and increasing flexibility.”

Specific to AT&T, Paolini said the operator is doing the right thing and “starting simple.”

“The more vendors you have in your network, regardless of it being open RAN or non-open RAN, the more vendors you have, the more complex the network. That is inescapable, even if everybody is interoperable,” Paolini said.

Managing that complexity will be the challenge for AT&T and Ericsson moving forward. Paolini said the carrier will want to eventually bring on more radio vendors to continue supporting deployment flexibility and maintain historical telecom deployment models that used multiple vendors to help mitigate risk.

“RAN is a business of scale and reliability, and I mean reliability not just in terms of network reliability, but you want a vendor that is going to be around in the foreseeable future,” Paolini said. “That scale is still going to be important because when you have a major downtown deployment you want to know that your vendors will be there. I'm not saying that a smaller vendor is less reliable, but you need to scale and those things are not going to change.”