Sushil Rawat, TELUS (00:21):
It is not necessarily challenges. What I would say is a shift in skillset and culture. RAN traditionally has been very centric about 3GPP and standardization and whatnot. Users or operators are generally used to getting a solution from one supplier and deploy it and somebody have responsibility of architecting it and making sure the performance is good. But with open ran, there is a skillset that needs to be changed. Operator engineers has to be capable of understanding software architecture, cloud technology, and the hardware design. So there is a little bit of a skill upliftment that is required, and I would not necessarily call it a challenge, but the operator has to play an anchor role in case of O-RAN where an operator is in the driving seat and driving all the suppliers to work together and make sure that the software life cycle and all the solution is coming together. Sometimes these kind of challenges are addressed by system integrators and sometime the O-RAN supplier itself is taking responsibility. It's, I see this being addressed as different business models across all operators and businesses, which is not necessarily a challenge, but I would definitely say it's a difference from doing traditional RAN and O-RAN.

Fernando Castro-Cristin, HPE (01:53):
We are the beginning of a journey, so when you are at the beginning of the journey, of course, there is potential interoperability issues. There is the technology that is promising something, but will take some time to implement. It takes some time to understand all the areas of improvement and to make the right choices. So it's a journey. We are the beginning of the journey. The most important is that all the main actors are totally engaged in making it happen: from the consumers, which are the operators, and the vendors like us, like the NEPs, everybody's all in.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (02:32):
So I'd argue that Open Ran isn't primarily a technology challenge at this stage. The whole point of Open RAN is to change how operators interact with their RAN supply chain. If you really want choice, then you need to do your homework on what your options are and which partners are going to work best for you. If you really want agility, you need to be set up for making multiple decisions and procurements a year rather than big bang deals and mega RFPs once every five or six years. Operators also need to decide what role want to play in this. You can be a systems integrator, you can look to your suppliers to come with ecosystems of their own and have the operator take more of a program manager role. There are technical challenges, of course there are. One key area is increased granularity and volume of data that's now available for the network via open interfaces. How to manage and interpret that and act on information in both real time and non real time. That's certainly a challenge.

Stephen Wiktorski, Samsung (03:26):
Integration and interoperability are going to be challenges at the outset of any new technology. And an open RAN is no different than that. It's not plug and play unfortunately at this point in time, although it is getting better. At Samsung, we've worked with over 30 ecosystem partners, including our partners, HPE, to build predefined, pre-integrated telco grade solutions that provide the right level of performance and reliability for our customers so that they can reduce and mitigate all of the interoperability challenges that the first removers had when they deployed vRAN and allowed 'em to get to market that much faster. I think another challenge you have is people and processes. The people are being used to, our engineers have been used to deploying on hardware based solutions. They're now having be re-trained to work on open software based solutions, and then you need to look at the processes. We need to reimagine and rethink those processes in order to get the absolutely most out of these open software systems.