ORAN Is Getting Mature Enough for Deployment at Scale

Open radio access network deployments could soon reach an important stage as open networks mature, experts said Thursday during an Informa Tech webinar. Speakers agreed that further work remains before ORAN is deployed by operators worldwide.

Carriers are becoming more comfortable with ORAN, based on a recent Heavy Reading survey, said Gabriel Brown, principal analyst at the firm. Nearly half of respondents now believe ORAN architecture is mature enough for deployment at scale, he added. ORAN “is making progress,” he said. “There’s more to push on,” but larger operators in advanced economies have a particularly positive view.

More than half of respondents expect a scaled, live deployment in a large area by the end of 2025, Brown said. Most of the product from vendors and technology suppliers should be available commercially in that time frame, he said. “It feels like we’re getting closer to a threshold for open RAN.”

One unknown when ORAN is deployed is “how does it actually scale across the network and the different phases of that?” Brown said. “It’s obviously going to take a good amount of time." To make ORAN work, operators must use multivendor radio base stations. “I don’t think there’s any way around that … but you don’t necessarily need to be multivendor everywhere” and every component doesn’t have to accommodate multiple suppliers.

The company Wind River is deploying ORAN at tens of thousands of sites for customers, said Randy Cox, vice president-product management and business operations. “We are at scale today,” Cox said. “We’re ready for [the] mass market.”

Carriers including Vodafone, Verizon, Telus and Boost are already deploying and achieving key performance indicators that are better or at least as good as those of traditional RAN, Cox said. Wind River is focused on “operational efficiencies in running a cloud-native network through automation” and “innovation,” which can include better energy efficiency, adding workloads and virtually new network elements like cellsite routers, he said.

“In terms of maturity, we’ve made a lot of progress,” said Paco Martin Pignatelli, head of ORAN at Vodafone Group. It took vendors a couple of years to get their basic radios to the necessary level of development and that was a struggle for some, he said. Radios must accommodate 5G, 4G and, sometimes, earlier generations of wireless, he said.

“All the assumptions we had at the beginning for open RAN -- in terms of the opportunity, in terms of the benefits -- are being validated,” Martin said. “More than ever, we know that this is the way … this was the right thing to do.” ORAN is deploying successfully in multiple countries, but more work remains, he acknowledged. For example, industry must improve network automation, multivendor radio testing and deployment and operations of open networks, he said.

In 2022 and 2023, DOD/NTIA conducted the 5G Challenge (see 2304070057) and saw in just a year “a huge improvement” in vendors integrating their products in a way they had never done before, said Julie Kub, program lead for the challenge. One of the big concerns remains that ORAN systems must perform as well as legacy systems, she said. Kub also noted the progress reported in September at NTIA’s first International ORAN Symposium (see 2409180034).

Operators remain concerned about testing, Kub said. “To have operators trust the test results and the certification and badging from labs, how can we get to consistent, repeatable testing worldwide?” she asked: “How do you divide up the work? How do you ensure that the test pieces work in different locations? Can you take equipment in one country and test it and get the same results in another?”