Put Huawei down as a firm no on open and virtualized radio access network (RAN) technology. Huawei CTO Paul Scanlan today made that clear — he and the Chinese vendor don’t support either architecture.

His comments, shared during a group call with media, aren’t a surprise so much as a clarification of the world’s largest RAN vendor’s position on two of the most hyped frameworks under development in the telecom market today. The pointed criticism also comes on the heels of a reckoning underway at the O-RAN Alliance, the world’s most powerful open RAN community that finds itself scrambling for a path forward following Nokia’s decision to freeze participation in the group.

Open RAN has a lot of problems, according to Scanlan. It isn’t standardized, can’t be easily integrated with existing network infrastructure, and it’s not ready for the most intense period of 5G deployments already underway, he said. 

“It’s not that it’s not going to happen, and I believe it will in different guises but I’m not sure whether … from a commercial perspective, is it too late practically?” he said.

“The challenge is it’s not standardized. It’s an association. Because things are not standardized, no standards, you don’t get cooperation, you don’t get competition, you don’t get innovation to drive this,” Scanlan said, describing groups such as the O-RAN Alliance as “just a bunch of friends.”

For open RAN to succeed, it should be pushed into the 3GPP as a means to get representatives from about 200 countries “collaborating with even more vendors and contributors from academia and others, all coming in there with great ideas to make a standard so you can have interoperability, because that’s what you need,” he said.

Absent standardization, technologies like open RAN become fragmented and lack interoperability — two outcomes that most network operators are unwilling to accept, according to Scanlan.

Open RAN proponents are also being disingenuous about costs, a commonly cited benefit of the architecture, he claimed. “The telecom operator’s problem is not capex, it’s actually opex,” he said, adding that opex eats up about 65% of the average cost per site for site rental, backhaul, and energy. RAN comprises about 12% of opex costs per site on average, he said.

The other primary challenge with open RAN involves security and point of responsibility. In a typical open RAN deployment “you’ve got three or four vendors all providing components that are going to be patched together. Who’s responsible for making sure that it’s going to be secure or it’s going to deliver” on performance and fall in line with guaranteed operating costs, he asked.

“Everybody says from a cybersecurity perspective it’ll be more secure,” Scanlan said. “Well, I don’t agree with that. I mean, who’s going to be responsible?” 

Huawei is almost equally dubious about the prospects for vRAN. Virtualization has proven benefits in the network core, and it will deliver many business opportunities in mobile edge computing, but security challenges remain at the edge, according to Scanlan.

“For virtualized RAN, what do you want to do with virtualization, what’s the target objective? When we put things in a cloud the first thing we’re really trying to do is create flexibility and resource scaling. And because it’s software driven, we’re able to change those things and downstream everything can operate from it,” he explained.

There’s also the issue of quality and performance as it relates to the use of common-off-the-shelf hardware, a central tenet of vRAN.

Huawei explored the use of commoditized chips in its 5G equipment about four years ago, but “the problem was that the jitter at the substrate level was too high. It would not achieve the targets that we wanted in terms of latency, so we had to develop the chip ourselves,” Scanlan said.

The longtime Huawei executive also addressed the underlying factors contributing to the hype surrounding vRAN and open RAN, noting the complexities and shortcuts that result from mixing politics with technological innovation.

“So many people just throw out virtualization or throw out vRAN, or open RAN, and all the rest for different types of reasons,” he said. “If you’ve not been either developing the technology or you’re not at the operator’s point to understand the challenges and the pain points of each of them, then often a lot of the reasons why we want to do something is perhaps for political reasons and just haven’t been very well thought out.”