Ericsson continues to eschew the need and viability of open radio access networks. Unlike its closest competitor Nokia, which has gone so far as to call open RAN the future of the radio business, Ericsson isn’t buying it. 

There is a limit to how much the Swedish vendor is willing to disaggregate hardware and software with open interfaces, and that limit is virtualized RAN (vRAN), a framework it calls Cloud RAN. Ericsson late last year revealed its Cloud RAN software that will hit the market in late 2021.

“We’ve been very active in developing and participating in what we the call virtualization through Cloud RAN,” Fredrik Jejdling, EVP and head of Business Area Networks at Ericsson, said during an update for analysts and investors.

Virtualization is a “very promising technology” that also disaggregates hardware and software, and allows for “standardized open orchestration management interfaces” on northbound traffic, he said. “We’ve been part of the principle of openness and increasing open architectures, and Cloud RAN is evidence of that.”

There’s a lot of confusion about the differences between open RAN and vRAN because the terms are often used interchangeably, Jejdling said. “What the market is looking for is supply chain diversity, solution flexibility, and other capabilities.”

Most of the automation, orchestration, and management function activities promoted as benefits of open RAN can also be delivered with virtualization, according to Jejdling. But vRAN has its limits as well, including power consumption requirements and performance, he added.

“There’s no doubt that when you build an integrated, purpose built system-on-a-chip (SoC) that you’re going to get better performance and get a better cost profile in the network,” Jejdling said. As such, he expects vRAN and tightly integrated RAN, which comprises the vast majority of network infrastructure today, to operate in parallel in a hybrid environment. 

Perhaps most importantly though, 5G is here now and for deployments underway today “that needs to be done with existing technology,” he said, implying that open RAN is not ready for the most demanding 5G use cases. “We have 5G technology that constitutes critical infrastructure that we believe needs to be built out right at this point in time.”

Ericsson is an active participant in the O-RAN Alliance and recently opened a 5G open RAN Lab in Canada, but it hasn’t seen or achieved anything that’s changed its overall outlook on open RAN. It still views 3GPP as the primary vehicle and body for wireless network standards to be designed and evolved.

“It’s important that we keep this industry together for global competitiveness. And we all know what constitutes the basis of connected devices — that has to do with one standard, one technology that everybody can scale and participate in,” Jejdling said. 

He also touched on the flurry of open RAN reference designs revealed by chipmakers Qualcomm, Marvell, Xilinx, and others, but again concluded that those options aren’t viable or commercially available today. Ericsson made a big splash with Nvidia in October 2019 about its plan to co-develop the “world’s first software defined 5G RAN,” but neither company has shared anything about those efforts since. 

Taken together, Ericsson is making its views clear — there’s a place for virtualization in some parts, and some of its equipment might become open RAN compliant down the line, but it doesn’t expect the industry to abandon or abruptly shift away from the proprietary RAN hardware it’s relied on since its inception.