Nokia is the first major radio access network (RAN) vendor to join the Open RAN Policy Coalition that was formed three weeks ago to promote policies that standardize and develop open interfaces. 

The collective noticeably lacked support from the three largest RAN vendors at its formation, but Nokia continues to stand out in supporting open RAN efforts by joining more collaborative bodies than its closest competitors Ericsson and Huawei. 

Nokia is the only major RAN vendor involved in the three largest bodies like this: the O-RAN Alliance, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and the new Open RAN Policy Coalition. Ericsson is a member of the O-RAN Alliance, but not the others thus far, and Huawei isn’t involved in any of these groups.

Varying levels of participation from RAN incumbents is noteworthy because while there appears to be widespread support and interest in opening and virtualizing the RAN, some vendors appear to be paying lip service to a more flexible network architecture while others are actively joining industry-wide efforts. 

Disaggregating network hardware from software on an open structure, thereby negating the value of tightly integrated but heavily proprietary RAN equipment, is still in direct conflict with the business models of most RAN vendors.

“Nokia believes that policymakers, operators, and equipment providers should work together to support research and development of emerging network technologies that include open systems, advanced 5G technologies and foundational 6G research, with policies that support a robust ecosystem of trusted suppliers that will create a strong U.S. position in secure wireless technology,” Brian Hendricks, Nokia’s VP of government relations in the Americas, said in a statement. “We believe this coalition strongly supports this approach and we are pleased to join and help the industry move forward on this important effort." 

Nokia also has some footing in open RAN as the only major RAN vendor involved in Rakuten Mobile’s recently launched 4G LTE network in Japan. The greenfield network is virtualized, cloud native, and operating on open RAN, but there are some caveats.

Nokia’s involvement with Rakuten Mobile, which convinced the vendor to open up its optical networking and radio equipment, is largely a “one-off thing” and not easily repeatable, according to Sachin Katti, co-chair of the O-RAN Alliance’s technical steering committee. 

“The whole point of these open interfaces is that it’s a very repeatable blueprint,” Katti told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

“[Rakuten Mobile’s] network is virtualized, but their [Nokia] radios are not disaggregated right now, so in the sense that they’re not using these open interoperable interfaces on the radio hardware side,” explained Katti, who also co-founded Uhana, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that was acquired by VMware to bolster its 5G efforts in July 2019.

“The thing with Nokia was not that they got them to use these new interfaces, but it was just that they could make the Nokia radio work with the Altiostar baseband software,” he said. Katti also currently serves as VP of strategy, telco, and edge cloud at VMware.

Rakuten Mobile is turning to NEC, Intel, and Airspan for the RAN gear that will power its 5G network that was recently delayed about three months due to some supply chain issues related to the COVID-19 crisis. 

Steve Papa, CEO of Parallel Wireless, applauded Nokia’s decision to join the Open RAN Policy Coalition, adding that its work with Rakuten Mobile is “conclusive proof that an open interface to Nokia’s radios is enabling American innovation to flourish in Japan.”

However, Papa also recently told SDxCentral that innovation on virtualization alone isn’t going to change the dynamics of the RAN market or accomplish the vision of a network running on disaggregated, open, and cloud-native infrastructure. 

“The place you need to put the money in is the semiconductor innovation and signal processing so we can disrupt Huawei there,” he said. Open RAN is, at its core, an interface like any other that promotes interoperability across a wide swatch of vendors and protocols, Papa said, but “[open RAN] is only as good as the radios that are available.”

Nokia, for its part in announcing its decision to join the Open RAN Policy Coalition, said open RAN technology “has the potential to enrich the mobile ecosystem with new solutions and business models, and an expanded multi-vendor ecosystem.” 

The vendor said it is already working on collaborative efforts at the O-RAN Alliance to define standards for an open fronthaul interface and near real-time RAN intelligence controller, and is championing open standards in 3GPP, the Linux Foundation’s Open Networking Automation Platform initiative, and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI) multi-access edge computing project.