Technology leaders today at Qualcomm and some of the world’s largest wireless operators gathered behind cameras and screens to tout the unmet potential of 5G open radio access networks (RAN). 

“As 5G innovations keep moving forward, we’re watching our more mobile, more intelligent, more connected world take shape. Connectivity and computing technologies from mobile are converging with traditional computing edge devices and the cloud,” Alex Katouzian, SVP and GM at Qualcomm, said during the Qualcomm 5G Summit.

“We're also excited about the opportunity ahead to build a more modern 5G network. As cellular infrastructure evolves to be more virtualized, modular and interoperable, it is becoming more open and competitive and a platform for innovation,” he said. 

Qualcomm officially set its sights on a return to the RAN infrastructure market in late 2020 with a trio of chipset platforms that it plans to start shipping in the first half of next year. 

“Our high performance modem radio frequency 5G technology helps us deliver unique horizontal 5G RAN platforms to infrastructure vendors, both established and emerging. We're actively working to deliver open virtualized RAN 5G network technology at scale to deliver this new approach to infrastructure,” Katouzian said. “Our solutions are compatible with open RAN and hardware accelerated virtualization and scalable from macro to micro sites with integrated support for 5G millimeter wave and sub-6 GHz spectrum across all key global bands.”

Qualcomm last month expanded that effort with Vodafone to publish a technical blueprint by the end of this year for vendors to build 5G vRAN and open RAN equipment with its silicon. Other operators and vendors are expected to join that project, which could position Qualcomm’s 5G open RAN silicon as an alternative in some instances to Intel’s FlexRAN reference architecture.

Why open RAN and why now? “It’s creating optionality in the ecosystem. It’s creating diversity. In some regions the amount of choices we have for RAN vendors have gone down to actually just two. In others, it may be three, but in either case it’s too few,” Vodafone’s head of network architecture Santiago Tenorio said. 

“Beyond the logical challenges of not having enough commercial competition, I think there is a more profound and more serious problem that innovation is slowing down,” he said. Open RAN strives to “solve that in a very elegant way, just giving access and tapping into a much wider ecosystem full of new choices, and with a streamlined path of innovation that can link very specialized players with field deployments very quickly.”

Naoki Tani, EVP and CTO at NTT DoCoMo, said the Japanese operator, which established an Asia Pacific centric alliance focused on open RAN earlier this year, has high expectations for Qualcomm to provide high performance radio unit platforms with the massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) capabilities that are required in dense urban environments. The operator is also looking forward to “distributed unit (DU) baseband hardware accelerators, which are critical in real-time processing,” he said.

Open RAN “makes it possible to freely connect various vendor equipment. Through this multi-vendor connectivity, various mobile operators will be able to flexibly design and build networks, and swifty deploy and operate them,” Tani said.

Deutsche Telekom is supporting and embracing open RAN, and looking to Qualcomm for support, for similar reasons. “With the software and hardware decoupling we have the possibility to create a much richer ecosystem,” Deutsche Telekom SVP Arash Ashouriha said, adding that the operator and others were supporting open RAN well before geopolitical conflicts impacted the RAN market.

“It was always that technology can be used to leapfrog architecture and to create choice. … For us, open RAN is the pathway going forward. It’s a fundamental part of our strategy,” he said. “Open RAN  is not just about the softwareization and disaggregation of the radio stack, but it’s a fundamentally different way of how to operate and integrate.”

The operator plans to deploy an open RAN 5G network in one town in Germany this summer, according to Ashouriha.

When will open RAN be ready and on par with incumbent architecture? Up until a few months ago, open RAN was primarily limited to rural deployments, but silicon advancements designed to support massive MIMO, including forthcoming chips from Qualcomm, has moved suburban and urban environments into a viable option in the relative near future, Tenorio said.

Massive MIMO is the only significant outstanding requirement for open RAN to flourish, he claimed. “Without 5G massive MIMO, there is no way that we can actually enter dense urban deployments.”

There was no clear path to develop that capability in open RAN until Qualcomm decided to put its silicon to use for 5G massive MIMO workloads, Tenorio said.

“When we announced recently that we're going to build reference designs together — Qualcomm and Vodafone — to accelerate the DU, the radio unit, but also the 5G massive MIMO, everything changed,” he said. “Now, open RAN is picking up the pace. And now, for the first time, we are not just competing in catching up with the incumbent architecture. I think we have a reasonable chance to actually overtake the performance of the incumbent architecture, and come up with solutions that are open RAN based and that they perform better.”