Ahead of Vodafone’s impending (overdue) announcement of the awards it has made in its Spring 6 RAN tender, Andy Dunkin, OpenRAN RF & Digital Platform Development Manager, Vodafone, told Telecom TV’s DSP Leaders World Forum that the industry must invest in vendors within the Open RAN ecosystem so that they can see a return on their R&D.
While rumours persist that Vodafone’s tender, which was intended to turn 30% of its network a shade of Open RAN by 2030, is not going to be a festival of largesse for a diverse number of vendors, Dunkin retained a positive opinion of Open RAN’s capabilities to put Vodafone on a good future footing to meet its challenges in the market, and praised advancements in Open RAN technology to date.
Strategically, Dunkin said there is now an assumption that the future network will be able to support AI services, and customer-facing services, at the edge of the network in the base station. That’s not easy to achieve with proprietary platforms, and operators really need to be thinking now about making the transition, he said.
In the UK, where Vodafone is replacing 2,500 ex-Huawei sites with an Open RAN stack, its partners include Intel and Dell in the hardware, Wind River for its CaaS and Samsung for vRAN DU-CUs, and RUs. Spring 6 will tell us whether Samsung has been able to replicate and extend that success at the vRAN layer, and how much will go to Nokia and the now Open RAN-compliant Ericsson (compliant if you shut your eyes to the tightest definition of Open Frontal compliance). It may also bring news of where in its inventory Vodafone will slot in new RU vendors, as mentioned by Dunkin, which may come from players such as Mavenir and NEC, as well as the established NEPs.
Whatever the results, Dunkin remains committed to driving further technological capabilities via the Open route, to drive more efficiency into the part of the network that soaks up the most capex and opex share.
Dunkin said that by “the beginning of next year” the operator would be able to deploy Open RAN radios in a “single box” that can support 95% of its radio configurations. (The other 5% is taken up where there is a proprietary platform there as well.) That means that the technology is “absolutely ready to make that transition to cloud-based networks.”
He also said that the adoption of open platforms at chip, compute, software and radio level has brought companies to Vodafone that it would not previously have been able to engage with.
“I’ve got class-leading radios today which are open-ready, sitting on roadmaps. So in the radio space we get good performance, good efficiency. The important thing to remember is that not every vendor has best-in-class products across their portfolio, so what we are able to do now is replace less efficient radios with another radio from a different vendor and improve our efficiency that way.”
Developing Open RAN with investment
He added that the operator is already working on a next generation of products, where there have been advancements in digital front end technology, open fronthaul processing and “surprising progress” in that last 18 months on Power Amplifier architectures, achieving today what seemed uncertain five years ago.
But he acknowledge that to remain healthy in the supplier base, Open RAN needs scale, and that “certainly today in Europe we don’t have that scale”.
“I think it’s a very positive outlook, but we have to offset this with the reality that, at the end of the day, we need to scale. And today, certainly in Europe, we don’t have the scale that we need to drive the best possible prices. Also, for all of these vendors that we work with, they need to see a return on their R&D. So we have to buy products; we have to feed the market, and then they can invest that money so that we’ll see a return on better technology products going forward.”
However, Dunkin had less leeway when ex-colleague Yago Tenorio, previously a prime Open RAN force within Vodafone and now Verizon CTO, asked him when the results of Vodafone’s Spring 6 RAN tender would be announced.
Dunkin, who would of course have been bound with the tightest of corporate comms handcuffs, could only say, “Very soon.” You’d expect Dunkin, who has been involved in the guts of Open RAN for years, from the chip level upwards, to have a positive view of what OPEN RAN can bring. If the tender under-delivers on its original public goals, which were to increase optionality and vendor diversity, then it won’t be down to the efforts of Dunkin and his team, and the likes of the Malaga chip research facility.
Here’s a piece from 2018 on the formation of the Open RAN Alliance and demos from MWC, indirectly quoting Dunkin, who was already engaged in Open radio efforts at the operator, thus:
“Vodafone’s demos mentioned the involvement of Baicells (with a product at the booth), Parallel Wireless and Altiostar, as well as Radisys and Lime Microsystems. Lime has previously been involved with BT/EE on its trials of programmable radio using open source software. Andy Dunkin of Vodafone said that the company was looking for commercial product this year – with the rural coverage use case being the first. That would then feed revenues back to vendors to be able to expand their efforts, he said.”
The vendor names may be much changed in the seven and a half years since that piece, but the sentiment from is eerily familiar. So the still-open question is whether the operator’s procurement is going to reflect the views of those on the ground developing the tech.
