Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (00:13):
As we have seen, major network operators are now exploring open ran systems for improved performance and greater innovation along with cost reduction opportunities. But where is the market at the moment and what will the adoption of open ran look like by the end of 2024 to discuss this, I'm now delighted to be joined by Matteo Fiorani, head of Distributed Unit and Infrastructure at Ericsson. Hi Matteo, thanks for joining us. So it has been an interesting last year for Ericsson and the wider industry, especially in open ran. Matteo, could you give us a quick summary on what's going on? What are the key drivers in the market and how is Ericsson addressing these?

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (00:55):
Absolutely. I'm delighted to be here. We had a tremendous progress in the open ran space in the past year. I can mention first of all that we have made a lot of progress with our key customers in the industrialization of Open ran. Of course, one of the major achievements was the contract that we had signed at the end of last year to get with at t to bring open ran to the market together and explore new technologies in a partnership. But it's not only about that, we also made a lot of progress in relation to new technology areas. For example, we have released our SMO platform, of course Erics Orient intention automation platform. We have announced that mobile Congress that we are working with 14 different aaps vendor that will build aaps on top of our open platform to create a strong ecosystem in this space.

(01:52):
We also announced that we will be part of the new alliance, the AI ran Alliance together with SoftBank and Nvidia to explore the potential of AI in ran. We have a very strong partnership together with Intel where we have a tech hub in Santa Clara where we are exploring new open ran technology and bringing the innovation forward in this space. And we are working with many other customers to bring open ran into trials and into commercial networks during this year and the next years to come. So a lot of exciting news, a lot of progress in the open ran space. We think that all the technologies of Open ran, the cloudification, the open interfaces and the open management, the orchestration system are maturing and we are there to industrialize all these technologies in the years to come.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (02:40):
And if you can tell us more about the key elements of Open ran, what main changes can we foresee as part of the cloudification? You mentioned a stepwise approach to a cloud native ran software.

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (02:52):
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So there are many definitions of open ran and when we at Ericson define open ran, we mostly consider that is composed of three different technology areas. There is the area of Cloudification that includes hardware and software desegregation and also the capability of running the ran software as microservices and adopting cloud native principle in the ran software design. So that is one aspect. The second aspect is the adoption of open interfaces, most notably the adoption of the open frontal interface. That is the second key technology area of open ran. And the third one is the open management and orchestration system that includes and real time ran intelligent controller that would enable ran automation but also new type of use cases including the possibility for service differentiation, monetization for operators. So these are the three key technology areas that make up open ran.

(03:52):
And as said, clarification is one of the three key technology areas is extremely important. We at Ericsson are addressing it in two different ways. First of all, we have brought into the market back in 2021, our cloud ran product, which is a fully cloud native implementation of the round software. And that compliments our traditional product called purpose-built ran that is based on our hardware asset. Cloudera is fully cloud native and embraces the concept of cloudification and hardware and software resegregation, but we are not stopping there. We are also bringing cloud native principle in our purpose built ran software. And over time we'll introduce concept like microservices and DevOps also on purpose. And this would enable us among other things to make some of the software modules common in between our cloud and product and our purpose viron product to maximize our efficiency, deliver features faster to the market and making sure that our customer will always have best in class features and functionality no matter if they choose to go fully cloud native or if they want to stay on a purpose built ran product.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (05:00):
As you mentioned, open interface plays an important role in a future open network and by this I am referring to frontal interface in particular. When can we foresee interoperability with third party radios?

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (05:14):
Yeah, open Frontal is definitely one of the most important interfaces in the OR architecture. There has been a lot of progress in the standardization of the open frontal interface. So first of all, I would like to give a little bit of history on how that standardization has happened. So when the OR Alliance started with the standardization of the Open Frontal interface, there were two main flavors of the interface that were specified. One was called the Cut a Flavor that was mostly designed for remote radio units and the other one was the cut B flavor, which was mostly designed for massive volume radio units. The CAT A is fairly stable, it's a very good interface. The CAT B solution was not fully optimized, especially for uplink performance for MAM O products. And this has been over time recognized by the OR alliance community and a lot of work in the last two years has been done to improve the specification to target improvements in the uplink area of the mammo systems.

(06:15):
And last year or alliance has come to an historical agreement to uplift the specification and introduce a new uplink architecture to address this problem. That for us has been an important trigger because it means that now the OR Alliance has a specification that allows to adopt the interface in all the different radio segments with full performance and capabilities. And that has been for us an important trigger to decide to introduce the open frontal interface in our entire portfolio over time. That means that we will support open frontal interface, standard compliant in our purpose-built ran software as well as in our cloud and software and in our radios. When it comes to interoperability that of course that requires an extra effort on top of the standard specification because it requires system integration effort and also a plan on how to do the lifecycle management. We expect that this would start soon. We are already working with some partners and we are planning to release commercial solution during this year 2024, and we'll continue in 2025 and onwards. And what we see is that the first step will mostly be integration of the remote radio units and massive IMO will be added over time.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (07:29):
Speaking about flexibility, choice of cloud and hardware platforms and ease of rollout, what is your view on system integration of cloud ran solutions? One that ultimately killed the business case?

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (07:41):
That's a very good question. System integration of cloud software on top of hardware and cloud platforms is one of the most complex aspect of deploying an open ran fully cloud native network. But it's still a very important aspect because of course what we want to ensure at the end with a cloud ran solution is portability. So we want to be able to port our software baseline over different hardware platform and over different cloud platform. This flexibility is one of the biggest benefit that the cloud and architecture brings. So we need to have a good solution on how to tackle the extra complexity that is driven by the system integration on hardware and cloud platforms. And the way we are planning to address that at Ericsson is in two ways. The first is that we will work on preintegrated solution. So we are creating an ecosystem of partners including hardware vendors and cloud infrastructure vendors, which we work with very closely so that we can integrate our software on their platforms before we go to the customers and with the plan that we will go to the customers together so that the operators would have a solution that has been preintegrated so that the large part of the complexity of the system integration lifecycle is already take can care.

(08:57):
So the pre integrated solution is the mechanism in which we address to a large extent the system integration complexity. Then obviously each operator has its own ways to deploy the Nectar can preferred products and solutions, so there will always be deviation. So it will not be a one size fits all, even if we do pre-integration. This doesn't mean that every operator would use exactly what we have Preintegrated. We'll have to make adjustment on a per operator basis in that space. We are planning for integration services that the operator can purchase in order for us to help them to adjust and make the necessary deviation to make the solution fit a hundred percent to their network. Through these two concepts, pre-integration and integration services, we plan to tackle this extra complexity driven by the system integration.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (09:46):
Network management is another key area in Open ran. Can you take us through the development in this area and how will Open Networks be managed to include both cloud ran and an installed base of purpose-built equipment?

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (09:59):
Yes, this is a very important area because as we go into 5G and as we go into open ran and we add open ran to existing purpose-built ran networks, the complexity constantly increases. So this complexity cannot be managed manually by personnel. We need way to automate processes for configuring the network, monitoring the network, and doing improvements in the network. So this must be automated. So innovation in the management and orchestration space is extremely important. One way to address it is through adopting the OR and SMO concept. SMO stands for service management and orchestration, the OR and SMO is designed to address this increased complexity through automation. And Ericson has launched an SMO product that is called EIP, Ericsson Intelligent Automation platform. That is and based on the OR and SMO architecture, including a network manager and orchestrator and non realtime intelligent controller. These different components will enable automation of the network and will enable the operator to manage different type of networks, including both purpose-built ran and cloud on in a consistent way, giving the operator a single pane of glass to manage the entire network no matter if it's purpose-built or cloud native. And on top of it, the operator would have the possibility to add a apps that will add additional control loops on top of the traditional ran control loops to drive new services and enable better service differentiation, making the network overall more programmable and also enabling 5G monetization. So the innovation in this space is very important, both to keep the cost down through automation, but also to enable new monetization opportunity through a apps and added on services.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (11:53):
And looking ahead, what needs to be put in place to deploy an open ran architecture at scale and where do you see the industry at the end of 2024 in terms of open ran adoption and maturity?

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (12:05):
Yes, we see that open ran is being adopted globally. I think that we are moving forward with the adoption of open ran. We are working with many operators in this space, so we see a great momentum around the adoption of open ran. It's a process, it will take some time, but we expect that during 2024 we will focus on a lot of large scale trials with some of the key and main drivers from our customer side. And in 2024 we go full scale in large scale commercial deployment. And beyond that, in 2026 expanding also the number of operators will be starting adopting this new technology as it becomes more mature and solid. An important aspect when going into this journey, especially for a company like Ericsson that has a large install base with many operators based on purpose built ran, is to think about the coexistence of cloud and an open ran metrics with traditional purpose built round metrics.

(13:06):
Most of the operators that will introduce the open ran technology from Ericsson will actually have also our purpose built around. So they want to have consistent way of deploying the solution when they have this mix and this type of hybrid metrics. And this is what we are putting a lot of focus on by enabling efficient coordination solution between these two technologies as well as a single management solution that would enable the operator to have a consistent network view, including both the purpose-built ran and the cloud ran. This becomes extremely important to make sure that we can in industrialize open ran and make it access a success for our customers going forward.

Yani Boyadzhieva, TelecomTV (13:45):
So lots to look forward to in the open round space in 2024 it seems. Matteo, thanks for joining us today and sharing your insights.

Matteo Fiorani, Ericsson (13:54):
Thank you very much for having me here today. It was a pleasure being here.