Don’t expect Ericsson to become a leading provider of open radio access network (RAN) infrastructure any time soon. The Swedish vendor formally embraced the framework, in part, with the recent introduction of its Cloud RAN offering that it expects to begin shipping by late 2021. However, open RAN specified offerings will only compose about 3% of industrywide volumes by 2025, Fredrik Jejdling, EVP and head of business area networks, said this week during a presentation, referencing a recent Dell'Oro Group report.

Ericsson’s vision for open RAN is pretty narrow, and largely driven by opportunities in indoor environments and low-threshold requirements in enterprises. “Cloud RAN is a software-based, [commercial off the shelf] based system [that] you can place on standard hardware that is available on the market. It is a complement to our existing purpose-built networks, and it offers flexibility and scalability for certain use cases,” Jejdling said.

“So this is in a way, to a certain extent, disaggregating ourselves by separating hardware and software, because we believe that there are complementary businesses that can be created by offering this in particular use cases,” he explained.

From Ericsson’s perspective, the evolution of RAN architecture is already being shepherded by the 3GPP standards body in an open community that includes contributions from many vendors. “Standardization and open interfaces in 3GPP gradually evolve, and we currently have about 100 open interfaces in 3GPP today,” Jejdling said. 

The vendor is also an active member in the O-RAN Alliance where it has worked on multi-domain orchestration and artificial intelligence (AI) driven control of the network. “We looked at virtualization, and as a consequence of that came our Cloud RAN offering,” he said. 

Ericsson believes the industry will evolve into two main RAN segments. The primary framework, which Ericsson remains focused on, adheres to end-to-end integration. These “demanding high-performance use cases, like the wide-area networks that we build today, are fairly complex [and] require a level of integration between hardware and hardware, and hardware and software,” Jejdling said.

The other segment will power less-demanding applications, "and, in a way, those can then be served by multi-vendor solutions, and to a certain extent our Cloud RAN introduction is participating in that through disaggregating hardware and software,” he explained. This more open approach “enables a different architecture more suitable for certain use cases.”

Open RAN will continue to evolve, but Ericsson expects the uptake to be limited until 2023. The vendor also highlighted ongoing challenges around intellectual property rights policies and interoperability that will have to be resolved before open RAN gains much momentum.

Ericsson’s Cloud RAN effort is underpinned by new 5G software stacks that can be executed on general-purpose hardware, Per Narvinger, the company’s head of product area networks, said during a demonstration at Ericsson’s investor event.

Describing RAN architecture as the sum of two parts — radios and basebands — he noted that Ericsson’s radios are proprietary, tightly integrated pieces of equipment and software that will remain as such. The other key part of mobile network architecture, compute or basebands, typically sit in cabinets at the radio site that also house power and battery backups.

These pieces of hardware act as the brain of the network, and Ericsson Cloud RAN allows those to run on general-purpose hardware from other vendors, Narvinger explained. “If you have good transport to the site, you don’t even need to have it in a cabinet. It can sit in a computer center and be fully virtualized then, and that is what Cloud RAN is all about,” he said. 

“Building products and engineering is all about trade-offs, and with cloud, you can make different trade-offs. You can optimize more for scaling and flexibility,” Narvinger said, adding that service providers can use virtualization to scale up and scale down networks and services for specific uses based on real-time fluctuations in usage. 

The takeaway is that Ericsson will soon be able to support customers who want traditional or cloud-enabled RAN, depending on their needs, but the company’s business model won’t be changing any time soon. 

“In essence, we see an end-to-end integrated segment prevailing, which will complement then certain applications with open RAN over time,” Jejdling said.