“We are seeing the maturity of the products that go through that, but again, it’s never going to be USB plug-and-play, right?…It’s a telecom network. “We started with no products really going through certification to several that have gone through and are fully-certified right now,” Wong said.
In these capacities, he says he has seen a lot of progress in the past few years based on managing plug fests and following action from the Open Test and Integration Centers. In addition to being the Director of RF and Wireless architecture in Office of the CTO for Viavi Solutions, Ian Wong also serves as co-chair of the O-RAN Alliance’s Testing and Integration Focus Group. And this also means that your cloud infrastructure, again, it’s common with others workloads, needs to properly manage this hardware accelerate and present it correctly to the radio access network CNF.” Open RAN isn’t plug-and-play but “plug-and-playable” “You need to leverage hardware acceleration…It’s mandatory, especially when you start to use technologies such as massive MIMO. That puts some pressure on your infrastructure.”įor the Open RAN aspect, Simon cited challenges with performance and power consumption. If you are looking at the core network CNF, for instance, you need very high security, you need super good isolation, and you need to comply to both, let’s say, technical and regulatory requirements. “You need to do so because otherwise you lose all the benefit of scale…Putting this in place, this was a challenge because there are different requirements. The cloud-native piece was the other major challenge, he said, specifically deploying multiple CNFs on a single cloud infrastructure. However, he said, this challenge was “probably the easy piece” based on years of institutional experience driving interoperability in 2G, 3G and 4G. Reflecting on Orange’s experience building these advanced networks, Simon said Standalone 5G unto itself was a significant challenge with regard to interoperability, including the radio network. “I really see good progress and I’m expecting that in the coming years, this challenge will be much easier to do.” “But what I can see is that in the two last years, I already saw the industry progressing in this direction.” He called out progress in creating commonalities between cloud-native network function vendors, infrastructure vendors, and network tooling vendors. It was not plug-and-play at all,” the operator’s Principal Engineer for Data and AI Olivier Simon said.
BUT PLUG PLAY TRIAL
Orange has built a number of Open RAN trial networks, including an end-to-end cloud-native Standalone 5G network that followed an open approach to the RAN. “So I think from that regard, we can at least draw the conclusion that the technology has reached a level of maturity that allows that.”
He pointed out that operators have regulatory and legal requirements to carry things like emergency communications services which requires extensive planning and testing.Įven though Open RAN introduces hardware/software disaggregation, Lopez said, “Anytime you introduce a new vendor or anytime you introduce a new technology in telecoms, it requires all that work to make sure that when it’s deployed commercially at scale, it is basically able to carry the duty of the operator to have a reliable network.” That said, Lopez noted stable, performant commercial deployments. “If we look at a telecoms network, I think there’s not a lot of things that are really plug-and-play in the sense that telecoms networks are very complex beasts with a lot of different elements,” Patrick Lopez, global vice president of 5G product management for NEC, told RCR Wireless News during the recent Open RAN Global Forum.
While this notion of a plug-and-play RAN is certainly desirable, is it realistic? We asked a panel of experts what plug-and-play really means in the context of Open RAN-spoiler alert: progress has been made but this likely isn’t going to resemble enterprise Wi-Fi anytime soon.
BUT PLUG PLAY SOFTWARE
The consensus is that interoperability has made material progress but there’s still work to doĪs Open RAN has gained momentum in recent years, there’s been this recurring talking point around modular radio system hardware and software being assembled and disassembled to support operators’ specific needs.
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