Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:12):
Hello, you are watching the Open Ran Summit part of our year round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels Avenir is one of the leading proponents of Open RAN and its virtualized network architecture with work dating back to the early days of X ran Who Better to give us a progress report on the current state of play of Open ran and the lessons learned so far in what is still a relatively short timeframe. Joining me now is John Baker, SVP of business Development at Avenir. Hello John, really good to see you again. Now during this year's summit, we have been looking at the advances made to date on Open RAN and its deployment as well as considering its prospects for the next couple of years. Can we start by identifying the progress of Open Ran and can you give us an update as to where we are as an industry?

John Baker, Mavenir (01:12):
Yeah, great to be with you Guy and certainly as you say, it is been about six and a half years since we really got into this open ran venture and with about six companies that really formed the basis of X ran that, which then moved into the Aran Alliance. And as such we have now over 127 companies in 21 countries actually participating in the open ran ecosystem. And the initial criteria for Open RAN was to bring new system vendors as an alternative to the two trusted incumbents. And as such, today we have over seven new system end-to-end suppliers in the open ran ecosystem. So I would argue strongly that today Open Ran has been a success within the vendor community and in the operator community.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (02:05):
Well, let's talk about that ecosystem, John, because Central to Open RAN is the support of a broadened engaged ecosystem that covers technology companies through to apps developers. Is open run succeeding with this goal? Where are we today in terms of ecosystem development?

John Baker, Mavenir (02:24):
Yeah, I think we've certainly got all of the segments and I think I broadly classify the segments as the remote radio units, central units, distributed units, and then into the R, which is the new area of development going forward. But within each of those categories, I think you've probably got between 10 to 20 companies that offering product, which is Ang compatible. And Avenir alone is integrated with 14 plus different radio vendors over the last couple of years. And then as of the end of last year, we've seen both Ericsson and Nokia really stepping up and starting to take the open round journey. And to that extent, pretty much every trusted vendor in the marketplace is now on the open ran train.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:20):
Well, as we've heard, a huge amount of work has been done to get open, ran to this point. All eyes are now on commercial deployments, especially around Brownfield sites. What's your view on the current adoption of Open ran?

John Baker, Mavenir (03:35):
Yeah, I think first of all I would say, as I've always said over the last few years, it's not a revolution, it's an evolution. And the adoption of Open Ran is really sort of based on expiry of existing customer contracts and new frequency bands becoming available. And from an avenue perspective alone, we've seen deployments and contracts being led with the likes of Doce Telecom with Vodafone VMO two Dish in the us, which is still the largest and the fastest open RAN deployment has gone out there with over 20,000 sites today supported by Open Ran software. Momentum is gathering and we still see new operators coming into the deployment scenarios on a weekly, monthly basis. So we expect that to continue as existing incumbent vendors contracts expire and operators make their decision between non standalone 5G and standalone 5G.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:46):
And there's obviously a lot more to come John, but we've seen so much already. What have we learned then so far as an industry? What are the key learnings from getting open ran to this stage?

John Baker, Mavenir (04:58):
Yeah, I think the biggest one is vendors and operators have learned to work together and that's a huge step forward in the industry in terms of speed of innovation in which you can bring new technology, new interfaces, and new vendors to the table and prove that partners can work together and compete at the same time and rapidly solve problems that may exist in terms of the integration process. And we've also seen that in the standardization world with the N Alliance rapidly bringing new specifications together and bringing 'em through the Etsy adoption process. And what this is showing overall is that with Open Ran, we've really broken the generational labels effectively that have been tasked such as two G, 3G, 4G, where every two, three years you come out with another generation of technology going forward. With Open Ran being the basis of a six G architecture and a six G platform, there is absolutely no reason why operators are working on the generational cycles anymore. You're going to see new technology solutions, new features, new applications coming out as and when operators and technology companies can actually innovate. So I think it's a foundational change to the ecosystem, which we're going to see the benefits of going forward for a very long time to come.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (06:39):
Well, let me bring it to another point, John, because a lot's being said about the comparative merits of Open Ran versus more traditional ran. Now that we have data from a large number of trials and from early commercial adoption, what's the feedback so far on the performance of Open ran?

John Baker, Mavenir (06:57):
Yeah, so I think in terms of the major deployments and the tier one operators that Maven has been involved with, we're certainly seeing that Open ran performs equally well, if not better in certain areas then close ran. And so from that perspective, from a performance perspective and a future parity perspective, we could argue that we are there, we're equal, there should be no differentiation in any of this. And from a security perspective, open RAN is proven and shown to be equal in a from security perspective. So a lot of the early arguments that came out there from a number of the large incumbents about the weaknesses that have all been proven wrong essentially. And so it's now providing a strong platform to move forward on for next generation technologies.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:52):
Well finally, John, there've been a lot of positives as we've heard, but we know we're not there yet. There's still work to be done on Open ran. What would you say are the main challenges that still need to be addressed by the industry?

John Baker, Mavenir (08:08):
Yeah, so there are two major challenges that need to be addressed, certainly from a vid perspective. We've been very vocal about a couple of these. One is actually product certification. I think as you see in the ecosystem, there's 18 plus otics that have now been defined in the open ran ecosystem. But in reality you've got a question whether Otics can actually carry out standardization from an accreditation perspective. Can you go and get a product approved in one otic and then that approval process is accepted on a global basis? So we've got some teething issues there in terms of accreditation of laboratories and commonality of approval processes across TIC Labs. And then the other sort of elephant in the room is the definition around what is A is cu, which is being leveraged by the current incumbents to try and keep some exclusivity in the marketplace.

(09:17):
Just explain the background of that is that the great thing about OR alliance is that they didn't actually specify how you build a DU or a cu. The bad thing about it is they didn't specify how to build a CU and a du. So what you are left with is an operator to actually specify all the interfaces that are necessary on a common product or the industry self regulates to the extent that all of the interfaces defined in the ON architecture are actually available in those over round products. What we're seeing is certain vendors trying to keep proprietary interfaces in the products as well as adding open round interfaces to the extent that those products will again give vendor lock in the marketplace. And I think the industry is grappling with that issue to define what's the minimum configuration of a du, what's the minimum configuration of a cu. I think on the fronthaul side with the CAT a CAT B interfaces, I think we are good in terms of those fronthaul interfaces. But from an industry perspective and the operators avoiding vendor lock, they need to be very careful about making sure that the r and m interfaces and the necessary fronthaul interfaces support both forward development and look after the legacy development that's already done. Otherwise we're just going back into another form of vendor lock, which was caused in the industry about 15 years ago.

(10:57):
If that happens, we end up negating all the positive work that's been done in Open ran, but we know the industry's trying to get their arms around it and hopefully that will get resolved fairly soon.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (11:08):
But let's hope so John, it's going to be an interesting 12 months ahead, but we must leave it there for now. Good talking with you again, and thanks so much for sharing your views with us today. Yeah, absolute pleasure.