Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:11):
Hello, you're watching TelecomTV. I'm Guy Daniels. The O-RAN ALLIANCE will once again hold its annual summit at MWC Barcelona, where it will provide insights and updates on the latest open RAN specification work and industry initiatives for preview of what to expect at the summit. And for an update on Open RAN and the O-RAN ALLIANCE. I'm joined now by Rob Sony, who is VP of RAN Technology at AT&T. Hello, Rob. It's good to see you. Thanks very much for speaking with us today. Now it's been another active year for Open ran. Can you summarize the progress of the work being undertaken by the O-RAN ALLIANCE?

Rob Soni, AT&T/O-RAN ALLIANCE (00:56):
So Guy First, thank you for inviting me to speak today on behalf of the O-RAN ALLIANCE to talk about what will be covered potentially at the summit by our speakers. Diverse set of panels and discussions that will cover the progress of the O-RAN ALLIANCE. There's a lot of good news to report about the overall progress on specifications and delivery of specifications and the advancement of the ecosystem moving forward to deploy RAN technologies across the world, across the globe in a variety of countries. Significant plans announced by us and by other operator partners to continue to advance forward and deploy RAN based technologies. We're very excited about that. Overall, I think that O-RAN ALLIANCE has done a great job of developing a significant number of specifications that can be useful specifically for deploying radio access networks at scale, cloudified Open, open Architecture, open APIs, and programmable.

(01:56):
The challenge of course, is that like for any SEO, for any group that is very focused on delivery is to make sure the specifications that are delivered are actually implemented. We need to make sure that we're tracking overall the efficiency of what we deliver against what gets implemented. They're always detracting forces that will want to bring in proposals so they become part of these specifications. But finally, we need to make sure that despite that, that we see that we have regular progress towards the implementation and we get regular feedback and priorities from the operators on what can improve our velocity, what can significantly improve the direction in which we take and how we stay focused on a few core principles. A few core areas within OEN itself that engage a combination of operators, vendor partners, research institutions, testing organizations, and testing forums. The OEN Alliance is in the middle of now supporting and sponsoring not just the specification effort, but also the testing effort itself through a variety of labs, many of which are tightly coupled to the O Alliance through investments, through the otic based platforms and sponsoring things like plugfest, but also a number of less affiliated labs that leverage the work that's been done by the O Alliance to get to essentially minimally viable products, minimally viable profiles and minimally viable directions for moving forward with L ran.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:23):
So a lot of work being done already, but if I can turn to your own company for a moment, at and t, there's obviously huge interest in what you are doing and planning. Can you give us an update on the status of at AT&T's Open RAN initiatives?

Rob Soni, AT&T/O-RAN ALLIANCE (03:38):
Yeah, I think first of all, we have been engaged in, I think since we announced a fairly significant deal with our partner Ericsson, roughly a little over a year ago, a number of activities to now commercialize and deploy open ran technologies. We're moving basically in a direction with four different pillars leveraging some of the experience that we had in the past with transforming our network towards cloud and towards virtualized. We are essentially moving forward with cloud-based or virtualized space network management that will allow us enabled through the O RAN specification to run third party applications. So we'll run cloudified network management and that is now in our labs and now under testing. And we're looking forward to seeing that roll out in our network. This year. We're also, and we announced a few months ago, a partnership with Fujitsu and with Avenir on third party radio, essentially radio that will come from a non-traditional source for us.

(04:39):
We have not sourced radio from Fujitsu or Avenir historically in our company, and that is enabled through an open interface, open fronthaul. So that will be deployed. We have those radios already in our lab today and those will be deployed later this year at some scale in the network, primarily targeting a small cell layer. And then of course, we're very interested in introducing Cloud ran and we have a number of sites that are ready to go. We are waiting for some software lineup, but we're expecting to see a significant evolution towards Cloudified ran in our network. We have it actually in the labs themselves and a number of sites have already been pre-installed with servers so that we can roll out the software quickly from the lab to the field. This leverages the latest and greatest technology from Intel and from Dell Sapphire Rapids Space de solution.

(05:32):
Looking forward to seeing that giving us an uplift and an ability to move to a truly open platform, which is also programmable. But even on top of that, we also get the G four modem or the latest and greatest modem from Ericsson, which will give us an opportunity to support third party radios at scale without restriction. So we're seeing a number of things that will happen indirectly, and of course we're also in middle of now almost what we consider to be stage three of the work that we're doing, specifically in support of the CHIPS Act funding that we received about 15 months ago for the Accord lab here in Dallas and in Washington dc a number of test cases have been implemented and utilized, primarily focusing right now on Open fronthaul, expecting now to shift that a bit more towards the SMO framework and enabling SMO as well as enabling a variety of cast based infrastructures to support Cloud ran. So significant progress to report on in a single year of how we've moved forward dramatically. We're looking forward now to see these things scale with some volume in our network this year.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:41):
Yeah, thanks very much, Robert. Well, we certainly look forward to hearing more about those initiatives in the months ahead. A lot has been done already, but we know there's a lot more still to come from Open ran. What do you see as the future direction of the O-RAN ALLIANCE?

Rob Soni, AT&T/O-RAN ALLIANCE (06:57):
So I think again, it comes back to us making sure that we get mature specifications that allow for quick, flexible, easy interoperability. So as we march down this journey of looking at what's required to enable RAN technology at scaling the network, it's very important for us to make sure that we continuously get delivered from the O-RAN ALLIANCE, the things that matter to us the most, and those that enable effectively the pillars of the things that I just described. So open frontal, open network management, and finally it's often referred to as O Cloud or open cloud. So those three things are really needed to be driven to completion and ensure that we have interoperability across a variety of suppliers and vendors that can support us in our evolution.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:43):
And finally, Rob, can you give us a preview of the Barcelona event and what messages can we expect to hear from the O-RAN ALLIANCE Summit?

Rob Soni, AT&T/O-RAN ALLIANCE (07:53):
Yeah, I think the key thing is that they're expecting to announce and talk about expanding the O Ran outlook itself overall, the network and where the future is going. So engaging a variety of partners in the ecosystem itself and increasing collaboration that goes beyond just the vendors and the vendor ecosystem and partners and other operator partners into other SDOs. We personally have been engaged quite closely along with a number of our partners in discussions with Addis, but also expect the same thing with Etsy and other groups as we start to link the behavior and tie together even more closely with three gpp. So we expect to hear a bit more about that in particular. So there's an opportunity I think, for a lot of things to be covered basic on what other operators are doing in terms of their planning. We talked a little bit about our plan, but we expect a lot of the other operators to talk concretely about their plans, but also some of the operational challenges of rolling out O RAN based technology and what that means to them in terms of skillset and moving their workforces forward. So with that, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the OEN Summit, the OR Alliance sponsored by the Oren Alliance in Barcelona.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:03):
Well, we must leave it there for now, Rob. Good talking with you. And thank you so much for sharing your views with us today. And if you are unable to attend the Oren Alliance Summit in person, you can watch a live stream of the whole event right here on Telecom tv. It starts at 9:00 AM Central European time on Tuesday the 4th of March. Don't miss it. Goodbye for now.