According to the Economic Times of India, a company executive at Mavenir, a US-based Open RAN supplier, said the widespread chaos in the non-proprietary RAN industry prompted the company to exclude Nokia and Ericsson from important players in the Open RAN market.
Bejoy Pankajakshan, executive vice president and chief technology and strategy officer at Mavenir, told The Economic Times of India, "We don't think Ericsson and Nokia are doing real Open RAN, they're just offering services verbally... So we (already) started to rule them out. ”
Still, the Mavenir executive said South Korean Samsung "seems to be at least trying to grab people's attention to capture the Open RAN market."
"There's a lot of confusion in the market," he said, because vendors, especially competitors, are trying to undermine the definition of Open RAN in different ways.
"We emphasize the openness of the traditional network (brownfield) X2 interface, ensuring that we can mix and match (products from different vendors) and thus avoid confusion caused by deliberate competition." Bejoy Pankajakshan said.
"As far as X2 is concerned, it's a 3GPP-defined interface that should be open." He said.
Unlike the two major traditional telecom equipment vendors, Mavenir said, telcos can actually test and validate their Open RAN-based solutions from third parties.
Nokia and Ericsson did not respond to any inquiries.
Mavenir also said two of its competitors, Altiostar and Parallel Wireless, have hit a bottleneck as Parallel wireless dominates the 2G and 3G wireless space, while Rakuten's recent acquisition of Altiostar has led Altiostar to shift to a custom product portfolio.
Bejoy Pankajakshan said: "We have been investing in Open RAN for the past six years to succeed in this area. He added that Mavenir has deployed in partnership with more than 250 operators worldwide.
"We carry more than 80 percent of the world's news, and our system has over 300 million subscribers and billions of users, which means they are very familiar with Mavenir's presence as a software company."
Recently, deployments based on non-proprietary wireless access networks have become popular in India.
Last year, Bharti Airtel partnered with Mavenir to conduct Open RAN-based field trials in the millimeter wave and mid-band bands after Barty Telecom partnered with Altiostar on the deployment of an open virtual wireless access network (vRAN). In 2020, Vodafone Idea also partnered with Mavenir.
Last year, Mavenir received a $500 million investment, which the company plans to use for research and development efforts to boost its 5G portfolio. (C114 Ace)