Bernard Bureau,Vice-president of Wireless Strategy and Services, Telus, has called for mobile operators to “push mobile vendors to move faster into the O-RAN ecosystem” and denied that O-RAN integration is too complex for operators to manage.
Speaking at RCR Wireless’ Open RAN Global Forum, Bureau said, “Don’t accept the rhetoric from established suppliers that O-RAN is more expensive – it’s not. That it doesn’t perform as well – it does. And that you need bespoke hardware – you don’t. And you know, if this is achievable for an operator the size of Telus, it’s achievable by lots and lots and lots of operators.”
We will leave traditional RAN behind and move forward with O-RAN for all our deployments
Bureau said that Telus began its first Beta Open vRAN deployment in the second half of 2023 in a brownfield, downtown area of a city a few hundred thousand people. These were fully loaded sites, serving nine distinct bands of LTE and three bands of 5G NR. Bureau said despite these complexities, the sites exceeded the performance KPIs of the integrated RAN equipment it was replacing.
“We were really pleased with the performance of the sites. It was the confirmation we needed that the time had come for us to pivot from traditional RAN to O-RAN deployments. We will leave traditional RAN behind and move forward with O-RAN for all our deployments.”
The company announced in February this year it would go forward to roll out its Samsung-based vRAN. To date Telus’s deployment pairs Samsung virtual baseband with Samsung RUs, including 64T/64R RUs, as well as RUs from one other third party supplier. The tech stack sees the Samsung vDU- vCU deployed on HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen11 servers featuring 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel vRAN Boost server (Sapphire Rapids), with WindRiver managing the Cloud OS deployment.
“Of course, we need the ecosystem to be mature and ready for us, but we are pretty bullish that we reached that point in Q4 of last year [2023],” he added. “And so today we are rolling out exclusively O-RAN and we stopped deploying traditional RAN.”
Bureau also said that concerns around the difficulties of system integration, including to Service Management & Orchestation (SMO), had been “blown out of proportion.”
Telus’ approach was to leave responsibility for integration of the Samsung vRAN baseband with the server hardware and WindRiver OS to Samsung. RU-DU/CU integration was a joint effort between Telus, Samsung and the third party RU provider. It only took six weeks to stand up and verify four radio models, he said.
Although Telus is also using Samsung’s SMO as well its vRAN platform, Telus’ small but capable technical team took control of integration of SMO elements, Bureau added.
“The difficulty of integrating the SMO components together, or integrating the virtual baseband, I think it’s blown out of proportion. Some industry stakeholders are trying to make money out of it, and that’s okay, but saying that it’s too complex for an operator such as us to take on – I completely disagree with them. It’s not a walk in the park and like I said we have a good technical team, but I can certainly attest that this was within our means for an operator of our size.”
