European-based telecommunication giants Deutsche Telekom, Orange, TIM, Telefónica, and Vodafone released a new white paper touting the progress and ongoing challenges of their combined efforts in driving the open radio access network (RAN). The release comes just days ahead of the MWC Barcelona 2023 event, which is set to be ripe with open RAN announcements.

The group initiated its work as a wide-ranging memorandum of understanding (MoU) in early 2021. The agreement called for the operators to individually and jointly commit to deploy the technology, and work with the O-RAN Alliance, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), and European and country-specific policymakers to help open RAN reach “competitive parity with traditional RAN solutions.”

The carriers updated that progress last year, with a focus on security and sustainability efforts.

The new white paper is the latest progress report from the operators, highlighting open RAN advances in meeting challenges tied to maturity, security, and energy efficiency.

In terms of maturity, the white paper touts progress in blending traditional RAN and open RAN concepts together, though most of that has been done in “non-complex” areas like macro radio units (RUs). This is specific to RUs that don’t include advanced features like multi-band/technology support and multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) antenna capabilities.

However, maturity is still an issue for those more complex features, which are essential to support advanced 5G services and future-looking network architectures like the RAN intelligent controller (RIC). The carrier group does admit that some of this work will require deployment commitments.

Those commitments were also tagged to a lack of broad open RAN deployments in Europe, which they attributed to legacy vendor deals and financial uncertainty.

“In Europe, the main factors delaying the open RAN adoption in tier-one operators’ brownfield deployments are existing contractual obligations with regards to traditional network solutions and the challenging financial situation that operators and service providers are currently suffering from,” the report states. “The latter factor has the potential to restrict operators from planning additional investment in network renewal, and so delay open RAN adoption at scale. New contracts for the next modernization cycle will be the vehicle for the wide-scale introduction of open RAN in the second half of the decade in Europe.”

This next cycle is likely to be around 5G-Advanced services tied to the 3GPP still percolating Release 18 specification. That specification package has a preliminary freeze date of December 2023, at which point vendors should be able to start pushing those approved updates into commercial equipment.

ABI Research predicts 5G-Advanced radios will start gaining traction in the market between 2024 and 2026. The firm expects the consumer infrastructure market will lead the space, with 75% of 5G base stations serving the market being upgraded to the 5G-Advanced specification by 2030.

The European vendors are also attempting to tackle open RAN security challenges that would align security requirements to those attached to current RAN systems. They noted current work with government bodies in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, and a focus on work from the European Commission and EU Agency for Cybersecurity.

This last work highlighted the most recent “Cybersecurity of Open Radio Access Networks” report that was released in mid-2022.

The group also cited work with different industry bodies, including GSMA and O-RAN Alliance. However, those efforts have been tainted by ongoing collaboration between those organizations and China-based entities.

“Any open RAN suppliers that participate in individual MoU operator procurement and [request for quote] processes will be required, as a minimum, to comply with industry established standards and specifications such as 3GPP and O-RAN Alliance, as well as any requirements from national authorities and operator security policies,” the operator group noted in the white paper.

The operator group also stated that progress continued to be made toward greater energy efficiency using open RAN equipment. They stated that current open RAN RUs match the power consumption requirements of traditional RAN equipment, adding that advances such as “sleep modes” will help further boost open RAN efficiency.

The group added that the energy efficiency of cloud infrastructure being used to support open RAN initiatives is also improving. They noted advances in CPU and accelerator technologies within compute environments; new cooling models for servers and cell tower enclosures; and increased availability of energy monitoring tools from vendors and third parties.

“The aim is to present the resulting framework for standardization in ETSI for a harmonized methodology to be used across the whole industry,” the group noted in the white paper.

Analysts have seen modest open RAN usage in commercial deployments but have noted many have been from a single vendor.

“Early adopters are embracing the movement toward more openness but at the same time there is more uncertainty when it comes to the early majority operator and the implications for the broader RAN supplier landscape now with non-multi-vendor deployments driving a significant portion of the year-to-date open RAN market,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz noted in a recent report.

The analyst firm in a more recent report predicted momentum would continue this year, though it expects revenue growth will slow “reflecting a more challenging comparison with the early adopters.”