Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:12):
Hello, you are watching TelecomTV. I'm Guy Daniels and in today's program we are going to look at the current state of the open ran ecosystem covering the latest technical developments, standards work and industry challenges. And I'm joined today by Ladan Pickering who is strategic product planner at Fujitsu. Hello Ladon, very good to meet you. Thanks so much for joining us on the program. Well, can I start by asking you how do you see the state of the open ran sector today?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (00:51):
There has been steady progress in O Ran deployment. We actually see that there are operators, new operators and existing operators that are deploying Iran in North America. We see Dish and TELUS in Japan, we see NTT Doomo and in Europe we see Deutsche Telekom and other operators that are actually deploying or run in their networks. So there is steady progress. We're seeing some challenges that steady we are overcoming these challenges.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (01:30):
Well let's pick up on those We, what would you say are some of the key challenges that you are seeing that could impact the development of Open ran?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (01:39):
Yes. So as we have been deploying ORAN for the last few years, a lot of these challenges we have overcome them. We had started with the layer one part of the network and now we are steady going up the stack to the applications and the recent heavy reading report of the operators, they see that there's a healthy ecosystem and there is a variety of operators that are using the networks and they believe the state of the network on Oran is very healthy or fairly healthy. But some of the challenges see are for example, on the interfaces phases, the R one interface that provides data to the applications and write back the data and affect the network. Those interfaces are not well-defined. The E two and O one interfaces, the D-U-N-C-U vendors that are providing those interfaces, they really are hesitant to completely deploy the interfaces and provide to 'em.

(03:00):
So there's a challenge. The applications that run on the network, they need the data in order to function. Other challenges that we see are not a true agreement on if the near real-time brick is required and if the xap which are sub millisecond applications or distributed apps are really needed by operators. Other challenges that we see are related to separation of the lifecycle management of the application versus the actual functioning of the applications. In addition to that, we also see operators have a lot of applications that existing today under Brownfield the SA applications and they need to move that into Oran. They want to have one platform that they can maintain and run all of these applications. So bringing those applications into Oran, their challenges associated with that. In addition to that, they are the R vendors that Rick vendors actually really control the flow of the data in and out of the applications. And if there's not a healthy ecosystem of the R vendors, the few will have a lot of control over the applications that run in the operator's network. For example, we see some SMOR vendors are trying to charge to certify applications. They want to charge app vendors to give them access to the data. So these are a number of challenges that we are seeing, but gradually, little by little we are overcoming them. So they are not, it just will take some time and some effort and they will be overcome.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:13):
Thanks for that update Ladan and we'll come on to covering the ecosystem in some more detail in a moment. But I just want to go back to, you talked about the definition of interfaces as perhaps one of the challenges that we still have to overcome. So if I can look at the specification work a moment and in terms of industry standards and technical specification work, what is the current situation there?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (05:39):
Yeah, so if you look at for example, R one interfaces, which is how the applications interface to the on the non real-time R and the network, the specifications are very high level. High level. And what we are seeing on the operator side, there is no clear definition as if these interfaces are going to be rest space or Kafka bus space and the app vendors will have to customize their applications in order to fit into what the operators believe the standards are or the standards will be. So we really need to put in more effort into standardizing the, for example, R one interfaces. In addition to that, some of the challenges that I see operators have, Oran has defined the E two and O one interfaces or even O2 interfaces, but they haven't really clarified how these O one and oh two interfaces that come into the SMO, they translate into these R one interfaces that apps need. And clearly they need to be some level of adaptation and I see some operators are actually seeing that and building those adaptations. But for the operators that are kind of starting to look at it, there is no clear visibility on how this adaptation from oh 1 0 2 to R one will happen. So we need to put in more focus and one of the things we are hoping to do as part of working with operators and other vendors is to clarify these interfaces and contribute them back into Oran.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:39):
Great. Well we look forward to seeing more progress there. Now from the outset, open RAN was designed to support the broad ecosystem of players, but what stage of maturity do you think the open ran ecosystem is at the moment?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (07:55):
Well, based on a heavy reading report that came in 2024, there is a healthy ecosystem of vendors that are available. But just like the lower layer level one stack that we have been working on, we need to have a variety of vendors to be able to really innovate and speed up the rate of innovation. Right now, the number of the R vendors are not as we hope to have with larger number of R vendors, the ecosystem and the apps will be healthier. So we hope that there would be a larger number of vendors or opportunities for R vendors because they will have a lot of control over the data that comes into the applications. In addition to that, we need to have marketplaces that would allow operators to have easy access into who are the available vendors that can provide the applications, what do their applications do instead of the way the current system is where the R vendors and small vendors or the current existing vendors into the network are offering their own apps. So I think we have room for improvement and hopefully in time we will see more improvement. One of the things that is going to help us is the government funded labs. As these labs such as Orchid or Accord bring in multi-vendor, some of the challenges will be resolved when some of the complexities will be removed as part of the work that is being done in these labs.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:09):
Great. So you've covered areas such as more RIC vendors required a better marketplace. What do you see as any specific challenges that the ecosystem faces that might prevent some of this from actually happening?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (10:26):
Right. I think the challenges more actually on the smaller vendors, larger vendors such as Fujitsu, we have a full stack. We do have labs that we can experiment with and we do have expertise to know how Oran works and how different layers of the software works. What is different about Oran is not just about ran, it also requires virtualization. It requires knowledge of the software. It requires knowledge of IP networking in addition to rf. So we do have larger companies have better advantage some of the work that needs to be done to help the ecosystem, specifically smaller vendors is provide lab access to them, including access to different stacks of vendors. And we are actually working with some of our partners. We allow them to bring in their network components into our lab to integrate with our applications. We are accessing their labs and have our software access their stack in their lab where they have only certain components but not a full stack. So there are work that we are doing to improve and I think with time and these government funded projects, it'll improve in time.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:04):
That's good to hear. I have a final question for you. We know that Fujitsu is heavily involved in Open Run, so can you share some of the latest developments from Fujitsu and what you are doing to solve some of the challenges that you've spoken about today?

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (12:20):
Yes. Fujitsu is we are committed at Fujitsu. We are committed to open networking. Some of the recent announcements that we have had or related to Aric platform that we have just GA and are available for operators to use. We are heavily involved in government funded labs, the Accord lab and Orchid lab. We are building applications that will control not only the Oran network but also Brownfield Network. We will be announcing those in Mobile World Congress and as you know, we are committed to open standards and as we work with operators and other ecosystem partners, we will contribute back our learnings and our findings into the alliance.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:22):
Well, it's very encouraging to hear, but we must leave it there for now. Ladan, thank you very much for sharing your views with us today.

Ladan Pickering, Fujitsu (13:30):
Thank you.