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Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
We're in Barcelona for MWC 25. I'm here with Abdu Mudesir, he is the group CTO at Deutsche Telecom, but also the chair of the board of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and it's the alliance we're going to speak about now. So Abdu, great to see you. Thanks very much for joining us. Great to see you, you, Ray. So the O-RAN ALLIANCE has been around for a while now, but can you just remind us about its mission?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (00:30):
Our mission has been and continues to be drive openness, drive intelligence, and drive virtualization. And that's relevant as it was years ago when we were founded as is today.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:45):
Okay. Now, what is the alliance doing right now to help drive the adoption of openness and of open ran capabilities?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (00:55):
I think first and foremost, very important is to drive standardization. So we push for the openness in front all, which is very important because that allows us to drive the next important topic, which is virtualization or cloudification in the baseband, which is a big topic. And then intelligence, which is very critical to allow for also openness on the intelligence re all one interface. This has been what we've been driving and we make it easy to integrate on to deploy, and that is the mission and we continue to try.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:31):
Okay. Now of course in the industry now nearly everything has got an AI angle as we can see here. MWC, how does that play into what the Alliance is doing, how it works, and how it engages with its members?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (01:47):
So I think the O-RAN ALLIANCE lays the foundation for all the AI or intelligence required. If you look at what we are doing in all the AI initiatives in the radio access, it's either for AI for RAN, which requires the openness of the interfaces to allow for independent capabilities to orchestrate and run the radio access network. That's what O-RAN ALLIANCE enables, or even using AI for other kind of compute require the openness of interfaces like Open Frontal, which enables you to run the base band in GPUs, CPUs or any other specialized hardware. And that's exactly what we do. So in a nutshell from the foundation, the O-RAN ALLIANCE had the vision to really see that intelligence will play a critical role. AI plays a critical role and that gets accelerated now.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:50):
Okay, great. So what are the priorities for the O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2025 and 2026? What can we expect to see?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (02:58):
I think what we have done so far has been amazing in driving the open front door, making sure that SMO is now standardized or rigged, and all of this is fundamental. However, if we are honest, the adaptation in terms of deployment has not been where we would like it to be. And I think what we set out to do as a board is this year to say, let's address the fundamental gaps. What is holding us back in terms of deployment? I think the first thing is we need to finalize and address the performance for Open Frontal, be it for massive MIMO as an example. And that's something we try to finalize. And second is, if you want to accelerate the deployment of any new vendor ecosystem or even just a new supplier to your existing suppliers, you need to simplify the management layer. And that's why we say making sure that we have key coupled SMO, making sure that we have the capability hardened, that we can use it. That's the next focus for us this year. And third focus area will be security. There's been a very good job done by working Group 11 and by others on defining the security guard rails that are required. But we want to make sure that they're being applied and certified and that the Zero Trust Network architecture framework is also defined in such a way that we can apply it across the port. So these are the three focus areas that I believe will bring us closer to much bigger deployment.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:33):
Okay. Three really key areas for the whole industry to be thinking about as well. Abdu great to catch up on what the Alliance is doing. Thanks very much for joining us, today.
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (04:42):
Thank you very much, Ray. Thank you.
We're in Barcelona for MWC 25. I'm here with Abdu Mudesir, he is the group CTO at Deutsche Telecom, but also the chair of the board of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and it's the alliance we're going to speak about now. So Abdu, great to see you. Thanks very much for joining us. Great to see you, you, Ray. So the O-RAN ALLIANCE has been around for a while now, but can you just remind us about its mission?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (00:30):
Our mission has been and continues to be drive openness, drive intelligence, and drive virtualization. And that's relevant as it was years ago when we were founded as is today.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:45):
Okay. Now, what is the alliance doing right now to help drive the adoption of openness and of open ran capabilities?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (00:55):
I think first and foremost, very important is to drive standardization. So we push for the openness in front all, which is very important because that allows us to drive the next important topic, which is virtualization or cloudification in the baseband, which is a big topic. And then intelligence, which is very critical to allow for also openness on the intelligence re all one interface. This has been what we've been driving and we make it easy to integrate on to deploy, and that is the mission and we continue to try.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:31):
Okay. Now of course in the industry now nearly everything has got an AI angle as we can see here. MWC, how does that play into what the Alliance is doing, how it works, and how it engages with its members?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (01:47):
So I think the O-RAN ALLIANCE lays the foundation for all the AI or intelligence required. If you look at what we are doing in all the AI initiatives in the radio access, it's either for AI for RAN, which requires the openness of the interfaces to allow for independent capabilities to orchestrate and run the radio access network. That's what O-RAN ALLIANCE enables, or even using AI for other kind of compute require the openness of interfaces like Open Frontal, which enables you to run the base band in GPUs, CPUs or any other specialized hardware. And that's exactly what we do. So in a nutshell from the foundation, the O-RAN ALLIANCE had the vision to really see that intelligence will play a critical role. AI plays a critical role and that gets accelerated now.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:50):
Okay, great. So what are the priorities for the O-RAN ALLIANCE in 2025 and 2026? What can we expect to see?
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (02:58):
I think what we have done so far has been amazing in driving the open front door, making sure that SMO is now standardized or rigged, and all of this is fundamental. However, if we are honest, the adaptation in terms of deployment has not been where we would like it to be. And I think what we set out to do as a board is this year to say, let's address the fundamental gaps. What is holding us back in terms of deployment? I think the first thing is we need to finalize and address the performance for Open Frontal, be it for massive MIMO as an example. And that's something we try to finalize. And second is, if you want to accelerate the deployment of any new vendor ecosystem or even just a new supplier to your existing suppliers, you need to simplify the management layer. And that's why we say making sure that we have key coupled SMO, making sure that we have the capability hardened, that we can use it. That's the next focus for us this year. And third focus area will be security. There's been a very good job done by working Group 11 and by others on defining the security guard rails that are required. But we want to make sure that they're being applied and certified and that the Zero Trust Network architecture framework is also defined in such a way that we can apply it across the port. So these are the three focus areas that I believe will bring us closer to much bigger deployment.
Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:33):
Okay. Three really key areas for the whole industry to be thinking about as well. Abdu great to catch up on what the Alliance is doing. Thanks very much for joining us, today.
Abdurazak Mudesir, O-RAN ALLIANCE (04:42):
Thank you very much, Ray. Thank you.
Please note that video transcripts are provided for reference only – content may vary from the published video or contain inaccuracies.
Abdurazak Mudesir, Group CTO, Deutsche Telekom AG, Chair of the Board of the O-RAN ALLIANCE
Abdu Mudesir, who is chair of the O-RAN ALLIANCE board as well as group CTO at Deutsche Telekom, outlines the industry body’s mission, discusses how it is setting the foundations for AI-native telcos, and reveals its priorities for the coming years.
Recorded: March 2025
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