Altiostar has been pushing for open radio access network (RAN) interfaces and architecture since CEO Ashraf Dahod founded the company in 2011.

Nearly a decade later, that vision has become a force that is poised to upend one of the most critical components of mobile networks. Open RAN has made considerable strides and while it’s not the dominant technology framework for mobile networks today, Dahod is confident that will change soon.

“There is now a significant global movement to go to open RAN,” he told SDxCentral. “In the next three years, economic forces will drive operators to go to open RAN.”

With multiple surveys indicating that customers are largely unwilling to pay extra for 5G connectivity, economics are going to force operators to seek out deployments that carry lower costs, Dahod explained. With open RAN, operators’ capex can be reduced up to 40% and opex can be cut by about 30%, he said. 

“The incumbents are supplying an all-in-one — it’s proprietary software running on proprietary hardware — and you’re going to buy everything from them,” Dahod said. “If you want to add a new service, you have to pay them millions of dollars to develop the software. And if you have three suppliers, you’re going to pay money to all three of them, and you can launch a service only when all three of them are ready.”

That model is running out of runway, according to Dahod. “Everything is moving to webscale,” he said. “The webscale wave in the radio is inevitable, and it’s just a matter of time. The benefits you get in terms of automation, the robustness of the network, fault recovery, being able to launch services when you want rather than being a prisoner to a supplier — the benefits are significant.”

Incumbent vendors also maintain silos around software, different generations of cellular technology, and the various types of hardware required, Dahod said. Altiostar, conversely, supports small cells, indoor and outdoor macro antennas, millimeter wave (mmWave), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), 4G, and 5G technology on a single software layer. That approach enables operators to “plug in different hardware suppliers depending on who provides you with the best value.” 

Under that framework, value-added functions and services have become virtual network functions (VNF) or containers instead of dedicated hardware, he said. “The operator has the freedom to mix and match, and since we are completely virtualized, if they want to launch a new service, now they can have the software developed by anybody.”

Altiostar’s open RAN software for 4G and 5G networks is independent of the virtualization stack, so its software can be ported into different virtualization environments and orchestration layers, including those from Cisco, VMware, and Red Hat. “We’re agnostic and we have very standard interfaces between us and the orchestration layer and the virtualization layer,” Dahod said, adding it usually takes about six to eight weeks to integrate with a new vendor.

“Once your radio is installed and plugged into the fiber or transport network, we recognize the radio and then we invoke the appropriate functions for the orchestration layer that then allows the VNFs to be created,” he explained. That, including software that must be downloaded to the radio for configuration, is “done automatically and we can bring up a site in less than 10 minutes.”

On the radio front, Altiostar employs two approaches. Vendors that are willing to interoperate with Altiostar’s software can be certified and shipped together. Several vendors are involved in that effort, including NEC, Fujitsu, Airspan Networks, Nokia, MTI Mobile, and others.  “In cases where the radio ecosystem does not exist, then we can [create] a design and then license it to a third-party manufacturer who can then supply directly to a carrier,” Dahod said. 

“Our goal is to enable the supply chain,” he said. Altiostar’s software has “dramatically increased” the number of equipment manufacturers that can now pursue the open RAN market. 

“Our focus is on software and for players that want to develop radios that contribute to the open RAN ecosystem,” he said. “Our whole objective is to be an enabler where a solution does not exist. If a solution exists, then we work with that partner.”

It’s no longer necessary for a single vendor to supply the hardware and software, he said. “We don’t see a need for us to get into the hardware business. As a matter of fact, we don’t want to get into the hardware business because we already have a very robust ecosystem of hardware suppliers.”

In that vein, Altiostar recently inked a partnership with Airspan to advance open RAN for 4G and 5G on small cells and mmWave spectrum. Altiostar earlier this week also joined a collaborative effort with Cisco and World Wide Technology to develop an open virtualized RAN (vRAN) blueprint for 4G and 5G networks.

That blueprint will include Altiostar’s software while Cisco contributes its own hardware and software, including its Virtual Infrastructure Manager platform, Ultra Packet Core, and Converged SDN Transport. World Wide Technology will then test and validate the open vRAN blueprint and bring it to market as a fully integrated offering. 

Altiostar’s largest network deployment to date went live in Japan earlier this week. Rakuten Mobile, the world’s first fully virtualized network running on cloud native and open RAN technology, is a greenfield network that also rides on equipment and software from Airspan, Cisco, Intel, Mavenir, NEC, Nokia, Red Hat, and Qualcomm. 

Rakuten Mobile also owns a majority share in Altiostar. Other backers include Cisco, Qualcomm Ventures, and Tech Mahindra. Altiostar has raised $357.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase, and its last funding round, a Series C, was closed in May 2019.

Telefónica gets the nod as Altiostar’s largest brownfield deployment to date. The operator last month announced that it will deploy open RAN technology trials for 4G and 5G in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. 

“Our sales pipeline hasn’t changed in the last four months, but what we have seen is obviously a big shift in many more operators accelerating and moving to open RAN,” Dahod said. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing some deployment delays, particularly in certain parts of the world where physical installations are at a near standstill. “At most it will delay everything by a couple months, but the opportunities aren’t going to go away and ultimately it will happen,” he said, adding that Altiostar’s suppliers haven’t indicated any significant delays in the supply chain.

“Our target is to have anywhere from three to five additional commercial deployments” this year, Dahod said. While 4G will continue to represent an equal, if not greater, portion of Altiostar’s revenue for the next 18 months, he noted that there’s plenty of opportunity to capture deals in markets like the United States where 5G deployments are already underway. 

“Currently the [5G] network in the United States is a tiny percentage of what needs to be deployed in millimeter wave, sub-6 GHz, and [the Citizens Broadband Radio Service band]. There’s a huge amount of deployment that’s still not done yet.”