Enrique Blanco, chief technology and information officer at Telefónica, isn’t backing down from a global commitment to deploy open radio access network (RAN) architecture at scale. Indeed, he’s upped the ante. 

Within four years, “if everything is going well, up to 60%, 70% of the total deployment of radios will be done with this architecture,” he said at Red Hat’s Open5G event. 

Blanco, in the final week of summer 2020, pledged to transition at least 50% of Telefónica’s markets to open RAN by 2025. 

“We cannot be sitting and waiting. This is not an option. We need to move very fast in trying to change the architecture because it is simple, faster, better, and finally, this is not our main target, cheaper,” he said.

5G open RAN is slated for small scale deployments in Telefónica Germany’s network in the first and second quarter of 2022, making Germany home to the “first sites in Europe working in a pure open RAN ecosystem,” Blanco said. 

“We will be starting in Germany, but later on we will do it in the rest of the countries in Europe (where Telefónica operates) and Brazil,” he said. “Germany is important. It is field testing real traffic. Not looking to see if the solution works. It works.” 

Analysis following that initial open RAN deployment of up to 50 base stations will compare quality in performance and maintenance tools to traditional RAN architecture, Blanco explained. 

“Once we see that the customer quality is competitive with the open RAN infrastructures, we will be rolling smoothly,” in the United Kingdom, Spain, and Brazil, he said. 

“When you're deploying new technology, and we are going to be focused on that in 5G, the key question to solve is, which is the right architecture, which is the sustainable architecture, which is the future architecture?” Blanco said.

Telefónica is deploying 5G new radios in most of its main countries using traditional RAN solutions, so its open RAN work is underway in parallel with that effort, he explained. “You can imagine that the cloud RAN architecture and the open RAN architecture going through massification of radios in 5G is the final line, it is a must.”

Incumbent RAN vendors Ericsson and Nokia will be a part of Telefónica’s open RAN journey to the extent that the vendors are willing to cooperate and open interfaces, but new players are being selected as well, Blanco said. Red Hat “is a significant part of this equation” and a “key player helping us to guarantee that we can host all the network functions that are a part of this open RAN software solution,” he added. 

Telefónica began initial discussions on open RAN six years ago and is now convinced “all the main issues have been solved. All the processes have been defined,” Blanco said. 

“2022 is going to be a magic world for open RAN. If I close my eyes and everything is going as we have predicted, and we are working, 2023 to 2025 will be the massification of this kind of solution and we will do it in parallel with the traditional providers,” he said. 

Clarity in open RAN architecture and its merits have been achieved, according to Blanco. “Nobody can doubt that the cloudification of the software baseband needs to be done in a central point. This is clear. You can be doing this using the traditional vendor’s approach or you can open this to a different industry. This is our bet.”

Because open RAN is an industry-wide project, Telefónica is also cooperating with multiple competing operators that share this vision, including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, Telecom Italia, Rakuten Mobile, and others. Europe’s four largest mobile network operators linked up at the beginning of this year to call open RAN “the technology of choice for future mobile networks.”

While much remains to be proven for open RAN serving some of the world’s largest mobile networks, Blanco said there’s just one issue that needs to be resolved: tools for network maintenance, optimization, and provisioning. “This is the most difficult problem we are solving today. We have time to do it,” he said. “We need to prepare the use cases to optimize and to manage the network, so we are working on this.”

Network engineers recognize the difficulties open RAN presents, but they are “excited because they are building a new paradigm,” he added. 

“This is the future for all,” Blanco concluded. “It is amazing, believe me, it is a new life.”