VMware, despite all the drama involving protectionism, geopolitics, security, and international trade surrounding the O-RAN Alliance of late, remains firmly in its camp and unwavering in supporting the group’s ultimate goal. 

Concerns are merited when a large network equipment vendor like Nokia stops and restarts activities in the alliance, but “this thing is going to happen, and we are going to help push it along and make it happen,” Sanjay Uppal, SVP and GM of VMware’s Service Provider and Edge Business Unit, said in a phone interview.

Some vendors might leave or suspend activities due to concerns about the U.S. government’s blacklisting of some China-based O-RAN Alliance members, but Uppal doesn’t expect this issue to significantly disrupt the work underway. It could, however, impact the speed at which O-RAN Alliance specifications progress, he said.

The matter that prompted Nokia to pause participation in the O-RAN Alliance, while apparently resolved publicly, doesn’t appear to be going away. At least two Chinese companies blacklisted by the U.S. government are still O-RAN Alliance members.

Nonetheless, VMware, like most companies supporting open radio access network (RAN) architecture, wants to bypass those challenges and focus on the objectives a disaggregated RAN could achieve.

“I think that the trend is irreversible. It’s going to happen. It’s happening in most other places in the IT industry, and it’s going to happen here as well,” Uppal said. “There’s just a lot of benefit in terms of this disaggregation, that it's very difficult to put the genie back into the bottle. That's not going to happen. Now you might see some fits and starts though.”

Uppal supports the idea that open RAN standardization could be advanced by a standards-setting body like 3GPP, but he’s not willing to discount the role of the O-RAN Alliance as part of that.

“I would very much like to see 3GPP adopt some of the work that’s been done in the O-RAN Alliance, but I think the O-RAN Alliance is absolutely needed,” he said. A “meeting of the minds” with informal decisions and interoperability work, when it results in an operator like Dish Wireless actually deploying a commercial network, something that hasn’t happened yet, can help advance the standardization process, according to Uppal. 

“I think the O-RAN Alliance can actually help the standardization effort, and yes, there is a downside to getting mixed up in this whole geopolitical stuff that's happening. But I think there's no way to dissociate ourselves from it because of the importance of the network,” he said.

“The amount of spend that has gone into purchasing of spectrum, the amount of spend in the infrastructure, this just has all of that connotation,” Uppal added. “And then the security implications. If someone can actually see all of the traffic from a country, wow that's huge.”

Indeed, one of the claims the U.S. government has consistently levied against some Chinese vendors is that Chinese-made equipment and software could be used to spy on Americans and assist the Chinese government’s espionage efforts. 

“It's very difficult to dissociate it from all those geopolitical and security issues, but I am a firm believer in the direction and in the alliance, and then eventually of course the standardization through a much more formal body,” Uppal said.