Stick, slip, slide: telco Open RAN commitments

Orange, DT, Telus, STC and KDDI give insight into Open RAN rollouts.

A busy week for operators updating on the Open RAN plans.

At Informa’s NetworkX event in Paris, an Open RAN panel heard from Orange and STC on their plans for Open RAN rollouts, as well as a dedicated session from Telus.

Sticking

Orange said that from 2025, any RAN tender will include a requirement for Open RAN interface support. The panel’s moderator, Heavy Reading analyst Gabriel Brown, pressed Atoosa Hatefi, Director of Innovation in Radio & Environment, Orange, on commitments the operator made in 2021 that 2025 would be the year it mandated support for Open RAN. Hatefi said yes indeed, from next year interoperability will be a must have in all its sourcing processes. 

“We planned it and it’s good to see we can achieve it,” she said.

Orange was already satisfied about 2T2R and 4T4R products, but Hatefi said it was now also encouraged by work in massive MIMO, meaning that it thinks it could support dense urban massive MIMO Open RAN products from a single server by 2026. One reason for that progression has been chipset development – especially with Intel’s Sapphire Rapids platform.

Sliding

Another operator mentioning Sapphire Rapids was STC’s Saif Alajaji – Senior Consultant , Technology Strategy & Architecture. Alajaji said the operator would be rolling out production Open RAN in Q4 2024 although that might slide into Q1 2025, following a “busy year” that came about as a result of an RFI in 2022 and RFPs in 2023. Again he added support to the capabilities of products based on the Intel Saphhire Rapids chip platform.

The Saudi operator would be targetting around 70% of its Open RAN sites to be centralised and 30% distributed. In February this year it already announced its vendor selections. STC is collaborating with Mavenir for Open Radios and cloud-native RAN functions. To host the containerised RAN and automation workloads it will establish new edge data centres partnering with RedHat, Dell and Cisco. An automation layer from Juniper will be deployed, which will include a Radio intelligent controller (RIC near Real-time & Non-Real-time) and SMO (service & management orchestrator) with AI/ML-based x/r-Apps including both in-house and from Airhop.

Slipping

NOTE: O-RAN “Industry evolved more slowly than expected” according to DT.

At its own Capital Markets Day DT said that it would have an estimated 3,000 Open RAN sites in 2027, a slippage from its initial expectation to have 3,000 sites within 2026. It acknowledged on its presentation that Open RAN had evolved slower than expected. That seems to sidestep DT’s own role in providing momentum to Open RAN scale deployments. Certainly the operator has not lacked for trials and PoCs with different Open RAN vendors.

But now it is targeting 2027 as the year it will have its own automated RAN management software up and running, and it is tying that same RAN Management platform into its Open RAN rollout timescale. The need for an independent RAN management layer came about as a result of DT’s deal with the German government to retain Huawei radios in its network, as long as the configuration management capability was independent. That necessitated opening up the Huawei radio layer to a controller that sits above it. As it happened, DT was already investigating an Open RAN SMO and RIC (Radio Intelligent Controller) layer, both internally and in different trials with Nokia and VMWare. 

So now what DT will do is roll forward that SMO/RIC capability as a RAN configuration manager that will apply across all its RAN estate, including all vendors. The actual government deadline to do this is 2029 but DT has said it wants the RAN manager ready by 2027.

Open RAN deployments will also sit under that horizontal RAN management layer, so it appears that Open RAN rollouts have been slightly paused while the operator works out how to retain Huawei radios and antenna within an independent RAN management software layer. 

An ambition for independent RAN management software by 2027

Speeding

Meanwhile, a day or so earlier in Paris, Telus had confirmed it was actually accelerating its Open RAN plans.

The Mobile Network reported in late September on Telus’ recent pivot that it would only install O-RAN compatible equipment from now on. The company’s Bernard Bureau stayed with an earlier claim that 50% of the operator’s sites would be Open RAN sites by the end of 2027. Where it keeps traditional radios on towers it will deploy a CPRI to eCPRU converter to interface with the O-RAN baseband.

You can read much of the reasoning in that prior report, but it’s worth noting that Bureau repeated, in his presentation, that Telus will indeed go Open RAN only from now on. 

“Pivoted to 100% O-RAN deployments in September 2024.

Good news for Samsung

Asked by TMN if Telus would look for other vRAN vendors, Bureau essentially said no. However he added that the mere fact that Open RAN could offer the potential for a switch is enough to keep vendors honest. That’s pretty good news for Samsung, which has won telus’ vRAN business for the Open RAN deployments, and now looks to be in a very good position to roll out through the remainder of the network (as long as it stays “honest”). 

Bureau had earlier added that the company has opted for lookaside acceleration as a means of enabling greater potential flexibility if needed. 

And it is also committed to developing an SMO and RIC capability.

”We are very excited about the opportunities for automation that come with the SMO and RIC,” giving it a level of optimisation it cannot achieve just with people. And it “cannot wait” to get going on a long list of RIC algorithms and applications its small but talented tech team has been putting together, with a target date of early 2025. 

The company has also merged its O-RAN special team with its traditional RAN team, having again just one organisation to plan and deploy RAN.

Finally, KDDI announced an Open RAN compliant rollout with Samsung – which you can read more about here.