Juniper Networks CTO Raj Yavatkar returned from MWC Barcelona 2022 with a growing sense of optimism and opportunity around open radio access network (RAN) architecture.

Many operators he spoke with at the show, especially carriers based in Europe, said they plan to initiate open RAN field trials this year in anticipation of commercial deployments starting in 2023.

“It’s not a question of if but when open RAN happens,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

The decomposed and open interface approach to RAN faces many challenges and risks, but there are points of progress that fuel Yavatkar’s optimism. Companies like Juniper enjoy an outsized influence in the O-RAN Alliance, where specifications are developed, compared to RAN incumbents, and discussions with operators are increasingly moving from the theoretical into applications, trials, and testing, he said. 

Yavatkar is also confident more operators will require future RAN contracts to be spread across multiple vendors, specifically disallowing the ability for one vendor to supply the radio units, distributed units, and centralized units.

“Telcos are trying to become tech companies,” he said. “They see how hyperscalers are expanding into their space more and more with local zones. They are reducing the last mile between hyperscalers and the end customers and enterprises, and that’s where the telcos get squeezed out.”

Indeed, carriers are loath to become a basic connectivity provider and they view open RAN as one of a few tools at their disposal to avoid that outcome. 

“I keep on telling my telo friends they have to take a stance,” Yavatkar said. Unless operators, vendors, and software providers band together to fight for a robust open RAN ecosystem, traditional incumbents will win the battle against disruption, he added. 

This tension plays out in the O-RAN Alliance as well, according to Yavatkar. Nokia, for example, wants to change the 7.2 split in O-RAN Alliance specifications for fronthaul between distributed and radio units because it wants to continue selling more vertically integrated parts, he said. 

“Traditional vendors like Nokia and Ericsson are providing a lot of lip service to open RAN. And in the process, they say everything will come from them, but it will be based on open RAN interfaces,” Yavatkar said. “But then that defeats the purpose, because then you’re not creating a broader ecosystem of players providing different components based on open, interoperable interfaces.”

Therein lies the risk, he said. Incumbents such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung can claim open RAN compatibility, but still require operators to use their vertical stack. Integration and interoperability between different services, products, and vendors remains a key sticking point for open RAN.

Nonetheless, Yavatkar said he doesn’t see any signs today that open RAN will be controlled by a few vendors, effectively repeating what’s occurred in the RAN market at large. The number and size of vendors targeted open RAN give him hope a larger pool of players will increasingly earn a slice of the action. 

Consolidation will still occur along the way, starting with smaller radio vendors and some software vendors to a lesser extent, according to Yavatkar. He declined to comment about Juniper’s appetite for acquisitions on that front.

Meanwhile, Juniper recently expanded its partnership with Intel, six months after it shared plans to integrate its RAN intelligent controller (RIC) with Intel’s FlexRAN platform for open RAN development. Juniper’s RIC takes direction from the O-RAN Alliance and adheres to open interfaces and APIs, but the specialized features it adds on top are proprietary.

The company entered the RAN space in 2021 through a licensing agreement it inked with Netsia, a subsidiary of Turk Telecom Group, that provides the vendor with exclusive rights to its RIC source code and patents. Juniper intends to differentiate its RIC by pre-integrating and validating the technology so operators can adopt it as part of a more comprehensive offering combined with other services.

It also joined an effort with Intel and Rakuten Symphony in late 2021 to develop an edge computing appliance to simplify cell site deployments in an open RAN environment. The Symware appliance features containerized cell site routing functions and a containerized distributed unit on a single-rack, general-purpose server.