Nokia has announced that it will supply the entirety of Deutsche Telekom’s target of 3,000 O-RAN sites by 2027. The announcement today follows an initial announcement of an MoU between the two companies in February 2023, which said at the time that Nokia would be the lead vendor of sites with an open interface between the RU (Radio Unit) and the baseband DU-CU (Distributed Unit – Central Unit).
Following the February 2023 announcement, the companies said in December 2023 that a number of commercial sites were now live. At that time Deutsche Telekom (DT) said that it would have 3,000 live O-RAN sites by the end of 2026, a target that slipped at its last capital markets day to incorporate 2027.
Today’s release is confirmation that Nokia will indeed remain as lead supplier as the O-RAN deployments scale up, for now stalling whatever slim hopes other vendors may have had of encroaching within the 3,000 site O-RAN allocation. It also confirmed that Fujitsu would have a role as a third party RU supplier, providing its mid-band RU in an unspecified number of sites.
The release also stated that Nokia would supply its MantaRay network management software. This is of note because it establishes Nokia’s software as the installed network management and SON platform for the O-RAN deployment. The MantaRay portfolio also includes the MantaRay RIC, Nokia’s Near Real Time RIC element that can control O-RAN compatible basebands. The press release made no mention of MantaRay RIC
However, DT has stated that it will develop, internally, an independent RAN management software capability that would enable it to manage all of its integrated and Open RAN sites.
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. DT will 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, and it appeared that Open RAN rollouts might have been slightly paused while the operator worked out how to retain Huawei radios and antenna within an independent RAN management software layer.
If the Nokia O-RAN sites are to be managed by Manta Ray NM, then there are three paths forward. First, and paradoxically given DT’s public messaging to date, Manta Ray becomes, in essence, the RAN management layer that sits across all of DT’s network. One intriguing sentence from the press release was this, “The deal will also see Nokia support DT with network modernisation alongside existing suppliers.” What does that mean? Does it put the Nokia network management capability on a multi-vendor footing?
The second path is that MantaRay elements become subsumed architecturally under an overlaid management platform that DT develops separately. For example, SON elements could be deployed as xApps on a DT-developed platform. A third option is that it is replaced by the DT-developed software, which would seem to question the value of rolling out MantaRay in the first place, given the concurrent timelines.
We have asked Nokia and DT for comments. Further updates if they respond.
UPDATE 29 November:
DT responded briefly to state that its vendor independent SMO and implemention of Cloud RAN are still in development.
It said, “Our phased O-RAN approach at DT has three key pillars, starting with Open fronthaul (OFH) adoption as implemented in this multi-vendor O-RAN deployment with Nokia and Fujitsu – which currently includes Nokia’s MantaRay solution. The other two pillars on our journey, namely the development of our vendor independent management (SMO) for the handling of SRAN as well as O-RAN infrastructure and implementing cloud RAN are still in development phase.”
The operator did confirm that it wants to implement a vendor-independent SMO, saying, “Our ambition is to operate our RAN networks using our common RAN vendor independent management system (SMO).”
Logically then, that would either put Nokia’s network management system underneath DT’s vendor-independent SMO, or it will be replaced by the SMO.
We also asked Nokia for comment but it has not replied so far.
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