The latest Open RAN Operator Survey released by Heavy Reading shows that Open RAN has made real progress in the past year, and the prospects are positive.
Survey data shows that 54 percent of respondents said their companies have not changed the pace of their planned Open RAN deployments over the past year. The other half saw changes, with 20 percent speeding up plans and 27 percent slowing down plans. This volatility is largely offset, so the overall finding is that operators as a whole are moving towards Open RAN at a steady, measured pace.
Vodafone opened the UK's first 5G Open RAN site earlier this year and promised to reach 2,500 sites by 2027, which will also be included in the Open RAN milestone. As another important participant in the event, Wind River will also work with ecological partners to put the benefits of Open RAN to the ground.
Steady progress, the Open RAN team is growing day by day
Earlier this year, Vodafone announced that it had opened the UK's first 5G Open RAN site. Located in bath, UK, the network is the first of 2,500 5G and 4G Open RAN committed by Vodafone and an important step in supporting the UK government to accelerate the development of the Open RAN ecosystem.
The "milestone" of this project deployment is not only this, but also achieves a number of firsts in the industry, including: the opening of the first large-scale Open RAN site in Europe, which will reach 2500 sites by 2027; the first 5G Open RAN site; and the first Open RAN technology to carry real-time customer traffic on the UK Acer station.
Andrea Dona, Vodafone UK's Chief Cyber Officer, said: "We have thus opened a new chapter in mobile communications. Our team has been working tirelessly to transform Open RAN technology from a lab-based theoretical application to real-world customer service – an impressive step in such a tight period of time. Open RAN has only been a concept for five years, and we have already achieved a fundamental modernization of our network infrastructure. It is a watershed moment for the telecommunications industry and a catalyst for change and development. ”
It is understood that in the first set of 5G Open RAN sites opened by Vodafone, neither 4G nor 5G radio antennas were manufactured in accordance with the Open RAN specification. Samsung and NEC are currently developing Open RAN-compliant devices that will be retrofitted on site once available. These devices will be validated in Vodafone's test and integration labs to ensure compliance with Open RAN standards prior to deployment. Deployment and integration are greatly simplified because the new antennas are manufactured to Open RAN specifications and interoperability validated at Vodafone Labs. And all other devices and software associated with this site are built to the Open RAN specification.
In addition, the 2,500 sites promised by Vodafone will also be implemented in an orderly manner. "Open RAN technology will replace Huawei technologies at 2,500 sites in the Southwest and Wales. The initial 2500 site deployments will be concentrated in rural areas, but as the Open RAN ecosystem and technology mature, more sites will be considered. These additional sites may be located in more complex environments with higher network traffic, such as transportation hubs and dense urban environments. ”
It is worth mentioning that the champions of Open RAN are by no means The Vodafone family, and the magic it emits is still expanding. Recently, French telecom operator Orange announced during MWC 2022 that from 2025, the company plans to purchase only network products with Open RAN interfaces.
In addition, Rakuten Mobile is also working with Qualcomm to develop high-performance 5G Open RAN devices that will be deployed in the carrier's network in Japan and become part of Rakuten Symphony's Symware portfolio. Telefónica verified the "all-in-one" 5G SA small base station powered by Qualcomm's RAN platform in February, marking another step in driving open RAN development.
Five advantages, the magic of Open RAN
Many operators have bet on Open RAN, so where is its magic?
"Open RAN is a new way to build and manage network interconnection solutions and products." Wind River notes that traditional RAN solutions often require telecom operators and enterprise customers to work with a single vendor to provide turnkey solutions that include everything from hardware equipment to software development. This turnkey approach is not conducive to the introduction of small vendors, as such vendors may not have the financial requirements or resources to build and manage solutions across the RAN ecosystem.
In addition, Open RAN Technology supports the creation of a standardization of all software and hardware components of the RAN to ensure interoperability between each component. This means that telecom operations and enterprise customers can choose a best-in-class solution provider for each component because the components are interoperable.
Ultimately, the goal of Open RAN is to expand the pool of vendors in the RAN ecosystem while lowering barriers to entry for small vendors and their professionals. Over time, the participation of more suppliers will encourage competition in the market, thereby reducing the cost of providing connected solutions and providing a catalyst for innovation.
Specifically, Open RAN technology offers several advantages to telecom operators over traditional RAN, including:
First, supplier diversification, the separation of network hardware and software components reduces barriers to entry for new suppliers, allowing Vodafone to add greater resilience to its supply chain by working with a larger number and more diverse suppliers.
The second is the catalyst for innovation, and competition breeds innovation.
The third is the opportunity for small/professional suppliers. Lowering barriers to entry allows Vodafone to work with more specialist suppliers. In the software world, this is even more important as networks become more "smart" because they must be supported by best-in-class solutions, and the separation of hardware and software facilitates this.
Fourth, energy efficiency is better. Rather than being limited to larger RAN systems, but separating open RAN into different components, companies can focus more on area-specific energy efficiency management. Many small benefits will accumulate into better overall benefits.
Fifth, focus on software operations. Ensuring that any software and hardware components in the network are vendor-agnostic and interoperable enables an overall improvement that enables orchestration, management, and automation to be software-enabled without necessarily replacing hardware components.
Wind River Studio, putting the benefits of Open RAN to life
"Vodafone is leading the way at Open RAN, which is changing the game in the telecom industry." Paul Miller, Wind River's Chief Technology Officer, noted that Wind River is proud to partner with Vodafone on this important milestone and put the benefits of Open RAN to the ground.
Paul Miller said Vodafone chose Wind River because of their commitment to building Europe's first commercial open radio access network (RAN), which will be one of the largest in the world. Wind River Studio will serve as a cloud infrastructure technology, providing a distributed, cloud-native platform that will host Vodafone's next-generation Open RAN applications.
Wind River Studio is the open RAN/5G vRAN de facto standard infrastructure and the only 5G solution for large-scale commercial deployments that supports flexible networks and provides a proven architecture to help service providers quickly and reliably deploy new services at an industry-leading total cost of ownership.
Wind River, which has been a leader in 5G many years ago, provides the core technology for most 5G RAN deployments through carriers such as Verizon and Vodafone. Wind River Studio solves the complex challenges of service providers deploying and managing physically distributed, ultra-low latency, cloud-native infrastructure.
Recently, Wind River Studio "next city". Wind River has announced that KDDI has recently launched operations in its commercial network using Wind River Studio as its O-RAN compatible 5G standalone virtualization base station support technology.
Paul Miller said 5G has created new opportunities to push more and more intelligence and computing power to the edge of the network. Our future will largely run on virtualized distributed clouds with low-latency, far-edge cloud architectures, enabling new application scenarios in a new intelligent machine economy. We have the ability to provide solutions that prepare for a cloud-native future and provide highly reliable, ultra-low latency, and high efficiency solutions for next-generation networks.
Kazuyuki Yoshimura, Chief Technology Officer of KDDI, said: "We are pleased to announce the launch of O-RAN-compliant 5G virtualized base stations and the opening of our commercial network. KDDI's goal is to provide customers with advanced communication services and ensure their flexibility and high speed with open and virtualized base stations. KDDI will continue to lead the development of innovative network technologies and provide customers with communication services that combine functional safety and information security with high value-added experiences. ”
The growth of 5G, artificial intelligence, automation, and cloud-native technologies has opened up new possibilities for edge computing applications such as robotics, drones, and self-driving cars. A recent forbes survey found that 90 percent of telecom industry leaders believe that more than 50 percent of their products need to deploy far-edge cloud computing in less than three years.
Wind River Studio provides a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operation, and service of mission-critical intelligent systems. Its cloud infrastructure capabilities include a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes- and container-based architecture based on the StarlingX open source project that can be used for large-scale distributed edge networks. To address the complexities of deploying and managing an on-premises cloud vRAN infrastructure, Studio provides the foundation for a geographically distributed, manageable solution. The solution simplifies day 1 and day 2 operations by providing zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes without any physical requirements for the physical location of these nodes.
This also means that Wind River Studio is also a key tool for implementing the benefits of Open RAN! Fenghe's positioning for its future is to support operators to use low-latency virtualized remote edge cloud architecture to build distributed networks, meet the diversified needs of next-generation networks, and support new application scenarios under the intelligent machine economy model. Today, Wind River has joined hands with a number of operators to adopt Wind River Studio to set a new milestone in the popularization of 5G virtualized base stations.
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