Telefónica today announced that it will deploy open radio access network (RAN) technology trials for 4G LTE and 5G in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. The global operator, along with Vodafone, is leading the adoption of open RAN in Europe but many other carriers are following in kind, according to Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research. 

Indeed, open RAN is gaining momentum around the world and it’s being driven further by recently increased cooperation and collaboration between the Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and the O-RAN Alliance. “I think that alliance was driven by the operators wanting a stable and coordinated path forward for virtual RAN and open RAN,” Nicoll said.

Telefónica is embracing open network interfaces that have been standardized by the O-RAN Alliance. The operator reached an agreement with Altiostar, Gigatera Communications, Intel, Supermicro, and Xilinx to develop and deploy the open RAN trials across its footprint later this year.

The operator made a series of moves four months ago, including a reorganization of its business units and spinning off operations in Latin America, to prepare for the ascension of open RAN and other modern technologies, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and edge computing. During a press conference at the time, Telefónica CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete laid out a vision for a series of business units that are fully digital and able to swiftly introduce and make changes to services. That framework includes fiber, 5G networks, and cognitive systems based on AI that can automatically “turn networks into examples of virtualization, softwareization, and clouditization,” he said. 

Álvarez-Pallete described it as an “unprecedented accumulation of technology” that is hitting its business and the industry at large at the same time.

“What we are seeing is the ongoing maturation of the open RAN solutions and technologies, but we are far from global commercialization,” Nicoll said. “Management of multi-vendor, virtualized solutions is also a significant problem that needs to be overcome but that is exactly the benefit of Telefónica’s field installations — to sort out these issues.”

Narrowing down those problems and getting the appropriate vendor to address challenges isn’t easy and operators remain concerned about that bottleneck of responsibility, he explained.

Vodafone, one of the world’s largest telecom operators and an early proponent of TIP’s OpenRAN initiative, started trialing the technology in the United Kingdom last fall. At the time it claimed to be the first instance of open RAN technology trials in Europe.

Rakuten Mobile, which is preparing to deploy a greenfield network in Japan next month running on fully virtualized and cloud-native infrastructure, has been widely regarded as a leading operator of open RAN, but it hasn’t been without challenges. The operator has built a network that uses a combination of equipment from established and lesser-known vendors. Its efforts have also been scrutinized at large.

“All the operators are watching the Rakuten development and activities by Telefónica, Altiostar, Airpsan, Nokia, Cisco, Mavenir, Parallel Wireless, and others to see how [open RAN] develops,” Nicoll said, adding that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Dell, and Qualcomm also have varying degrees of open RAN efforts underway.

“Of all the developments happening around 5G, [virtualized and open RAN] is one of the most all encompassing, but also one of the most challenging,” Nicoll said.

“Most of the talk around [open RAN] is breaking the hold of the legacy vendors on the RAN. One of the reasons the legacy vendors have had such a hold on the RAN is their unparalleled reliability and performance in a critical part of the network,” he added. “This is one place where engineering prowess shows. [Open RAN] has to show that it can match the performance, spectral efficiency, and reliability of the legacy solutions at a lower price point.”