Executives from Mavenir and Nokia shared varying critiques of open radio access networks (RAN) while a consultant on a panel organized by IEEE remained unconvinced of its near-term potential. 

“Open RAN is not a revolution, it’s an evolution,” said John Baker, SVP of business development at Mavenir. It will understandably take time to gain traction, but it’s not unlike what transpired previously in the network core space with virtualization making room for multiple new vendors, he added. 

“We’ve had so little innovation in this industry over the last 10 years,” Baker said, adding that open RAN encourages innovation, vendor diversity, and investment.

The wireless industry couldn’t carry on with a two-vendor monopoly for RAN in many markets, he said. “We’ve seen that whole process work itself out over time in the core, so there should be absolutely no reason why it doesn’t work in the RAN.”

While the opportunity and objective for open RAN is clear, it still faces significant challenges, particularly around specifications development, testing, and integration across multiple layers and players.

“It’s not enough that we say this is open RAN compliant because every single configuration that needs to be used has to be then tested,” said Jane Rygaard, head of dedicated wireless networks at Nokia. 

Moreover, interoperability testing comes down to the specific profiles vendors and operators intend to use across different interfaces and configurations, Rygaard noted.

This compounds concerns relative to the fragmentation of different profiles because operators still want high performance, which requires lifecycle management, she explained. Performance is impacted and requires tweaking every time a parameter gets changed, she added.

Strand Consult CEO John Strand remains dubious about the near-term opportunities for open RAN because of the state of 5G deployments globally. “I just feel it’s too little, too late. We have today almost 200 5G 3GPP networks which have gone live worldwide,” he said. “The reality is nowadays 10,000 sites are deployed every month."

Meanwhile, members of the open RAN community largely boast about trials as if they are commercial orders for real-world deployments, he added. 

“Open RAN players will find it very difficult to sell their solutions to the classic operators,” Strand concluded.