Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:24):
Welcome back to the Open Ran Summit, part of our DSP Leaders Coverage and Time. Now for our live Q and A show, I'm Guy Daniels and this is the first of two q and a shows. We have another one tomorrow. It's your chance to ask questions about Open ran, its ongoing development and its commercial deployment. Now, earlier today we held not one but two panel discussions, one of which looked at Brownfield Strategies and the other focused on the RIC. Well, not surprisingly, we have already received many viewer questions, but if you haven't yet sent us one, then please do so now using the q and a form on the website. And if we run out of time today, there's always tomorrow. Well, let's now meet our guests who are here to help with all of your questions. And joining us live on the program today are Sushil Rawat, who is director of RAN strategy for Telus, Juanma Canabal Muñoz, specialist Open RAN product strategy and planning at Vodafone.

(01:38):
Randy Cox, VP product management with Wind River and Rick Mostaert, vice president of Product Management RAN at Mavenir. Hello everyone. Thanks so much for returning for the live Q and A show. Let's get straight to our first audience question because as I said, we have a lot of questions. It's a very, very popular summit. So the first viewer question we've got here is what are the primary RAN concerns of the leading mobile operators? Is it initial cost operations, cost supply, and flexibility or service flexibility? And how does open ran factor into this? Well, Juanma, perhaps we could start with you as representing one of the leading mobile operators. What are the concerns for you? What's your take on this one?

Juanma Canabal Muñoz, Vodafone (02:34):
Thank you very much, guy. This is a very good question. Open RAN among the goals of open RAN, we have the TCO reduction. Okay? And I will give you two examples for TCR reduction and the need for gaining inefficiency, for example, base ones equipment, we cannot suddenly forget more than a decade of development in single RAN advancements regarding those equipments. And we pretend to do the same by means of code servers and obviously there are a lot of interest for reaching that, but we need to gain more efficiency regarding capacity of the servers, regarding speed, regarding the possibilities for scaling with less equipment, and of course regarding energy efficiency. This is a very, very umbrella goal. And the other example I will give you is the system integration. Okay? This is another challenge. Open RAN is basically like building with Legos, okay? We have many pieces of different shapes and we have different interfaces to match the different pieces. And if we want to build a castle, for example, in a reasonable time and spending as less money as possible, okay, we need to gain efficiency in system integration and as I said in the panel, in the certifications in order to build a castle and not to build a bridge or to build a cat. Okay, that's the idea.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:03):
Great. Thanks so much Juanma. Thanks for those two examples of operator concerns. And Randy, let's come across to you next. What are you seeing from your perspective as the major concerns?

Randy Cox, Wind River (05:15):
Well, I was just thinking about this and I had really had three items and they've aligned very nicely with Juan. I think the reduction of TCO has been a concern, but I think as carriers do their research and dig into this deeply, that becomes less of a concern because they start to see the advantages of O ran as a complete package. And so I think Vodafone is an example of that and there are a number of others that are moving in that direction as well. I think integration can definitely be a challenge, and we've experienced that and at least at Wind River, we've learned quite a bit of what it takes to do this type of integration and it does take initiative and planning on the carrier's part, but it is absolutely doable and it is just a different way of doing things, but it is certainly workable as we can see in the commercial deployments that we're in today.

(06:16):
I think the third one that he did not mention that I would highlight is performance. I think carriers are concerned about whether O ran can perform at the level of traditional ran, and we know that it can. We've experienced this in the UK as well as in Spain, and Vodafone has been very clear about that and public about that. We've gone through a lot of work to achieve that, but we now have very good proven evidence that O Ran can perform at par or better than traditional ran. So I think those were the three from my perspective of some of the concerns around carriers being willing to adopt O ran, but I think all three of them are starting to really be broken down into items that we can overcome.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (07:10):
Randy, thank you very much for those. And Rick, let's come across to you any additional concerns you're hearing or are you seeing a similar set of concerns as to what we've just heard?

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (07:23):
Well, I think, I don't want to repeat the great points I already brought up because they're all right on the money and as a vendor, TCO comes to the top. One of the things that I wanted to bring up regarding TCO, the energy efficiency performance, those roadmaps are happening. We have plans for those. We work with the operators and our partners, but vendor lock-in, I think it just must be said that that's actually a driver of higher TCO. And the industry right now is really, especially in where there's geopolitical concerns, there's not a lot of RAN vendors, there just isn't. So by opening this up, we've already seen cases where by bringing in new vendors that down prices, it drives down the TCO and that's absolutely a critical component and it does work. In fact, as an operator, it's extremely powerful if you actually have leverage to be able to replace or move somebody new in and you're not locked in. So I think that's actually one of the fundamental drivers originally for Open ran is to make sure we have a vibrant ecosystem of healthy vendors that can come in and continue to innovate and drive that TCO down.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:36):
Great, thanks very much Rick. Number of questions in about TCO and last year on last year's summit, it was the number one concern in our poll. Sushil, let's come across to you as well. You are sitting there in Canada. What are your primary concerns ran and how Open RAN fits this?

Sushil Rawat, Telus (08:58):
Sure. On top of what my colleagues from Vodafone and Wind River mentioned, I would like to top up two additional items in line with what Rick was just saying before. Vendor lock-in is definitely a very big aspect of motivation for operators to move into open ran direction. And the way to achieve that is disaggregation between hardware and software with virtualization of ran workload with disaggregation of hardware and software. Now what operator are able to achieve is do a separate lifecycle management between hardware and software. And the way TCO works is how you repurpose your hardware, how you change your hardware generation after generation, how you change your software generation after generation. Now if you disaggregate the lifecycle management of software and hardware separately, that plays a very big role in how you change from one technology to other technology or from one supplier to another supplier.

(09:57):
So that desegregation is definitely one major aspect of motivation. And the second most important aspect is now with Oran, we are able to leverage the capability of hardware even more than before. Earlier in traditional ran the hardware is purpose built and not always utilized to the full capability of silicon itself. It all depends on what your configurations hardware capacity and traffic models are. Now with disaggregation, if you have more capacity left in the hardware, you can repurpose that capacity for something else. You can run an edge application, you can run a routing application, you can run a UPF application. Now you have more independence and more openness of how you utilize your hardware, how you pack in more capability within the same boxes that is available in the network. So those are the two major aspects, two major benefits that I see motivating operator to move in the direction of Open Brand.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:58):
Fantastic. Thank you Sushil for that. A great set of insights everyone. Thank you very much. Well, moving on to our next viewer question, and this is one that speaks to first mover advantage, really what is the immediate benefit for the Open RAN leaders, those operators who have been first to deploy and for how long might this advantage continue? Randy, perhaps we could start with you and get your views. First of all on this one, is there a first mover advantage and as the question suggests,

Randy Cox, Wind River (11:33):
Well, I would start with two things. I mentioned performance before being at par equivalent to traditional ran, and so I think that's a concern, but I think that is an immediate benefit in terms of the carrier not having the concern around that and that they can hit the ground running from a performance perspective. But right behind that, the immediate benefit I would say is innovation. And as we look at innovation, there's a number of areas today that we're already bringing in the industry in terms of the ecosystem. When we talk about applications at the far edge, when we think of things like bringing a virtual cell site router to the edge and being able to replace an actual physical box at the edge has tremendous benefits in multiple ways, but namely in a reduction of TCO. Another one would be already mentioned is energy efficiencies where we're working very closely with our partners in the RAN CNF and being able to actually interact with the RAN software as well as the hardware in order to bring very specific energy efficiency type features to market that really benefit the carrier. So that's another innovation that is available today and immediately available for the carriers as they deploy.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (13:03):
Great, thanks very much. Randy and Sushil, you are one of the open ran leaders that's mentioned in this question. Is moving early giving you an advantage?

Sushil Rawat, Telus (13:15):
It does, and I would take this question even more broadly. It not only benefit the operator that is adopting it first, but it does help the larger industry. Look open Van has been around for about 10 years now and there has been a lot of investment through suppliers, smaller, medium size, big size and very little traction in terms of how Brownfield operator or big, there has been some greenfield deployment, but if you come to Brownfield operator or the large telcos, that has not been as aggressive adoption as everybody thought there will be. So now since more and more operators are moving in that direction, it's helping the larger industry overall keep the suppliers motivated, keep them going to innovate more. Now, when it comes to a particular benefit toward an operator, definitely the innovation first mover advantage is you make sure that the software performance is in place and once you stabilize the overall performance of full stack, you then have capability to leverage and innovate more and more in the new areas like Randy was mentioning about virtual routing stack, virtual UPF on the edge and whatnot. So it helps break that cycle of chicken and egg story where a lot of operator keep complaining that there is no feature parity and there is no TC advantage. But once you move ahead with doing it, you realize there is more and more potential and there is scope for more innovation and then you start innovating with suppliers and suppliers are motivated because you're actually investing and deploying it so you have more scope to innovate and end result save on your TCO.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (15:04):
Oh, that's very interesting. Thanks very much s for that information. Okay, I think we should move on to our next question then. And this relates to the RIC and of course we had the panel earlier on the RIC. So the question is we heard a lot about the intelligent controller today, but what is still needed for the RIC to fulfill its full promise? One more. Could we come across to you first for your opinions on this?

Juanma Canabal Muñoz, Vodafone (15:36):
Yes, of course. Well, I think regarding RIC platforms, platforms are ready. Okay. Main tax to finish are at least finish the basic standardization of Sun interfaces like oh one oh and oh two. Also I mentioned in the previous panel all regarding in interoperability and onboarding, improving the APS part, the onboarding, everything enhanced or improved by the certifications as an enabler of a seal of warranty. And also regarding some interfaces, for example, the two that definitely brand vendors adopt a clear position of openness in E two interface because some vendors are embracing the open RAN, but their approach is different. And obviously I have to say regarding a standardization, this is a nonstop task. Standardization needs to evolve according to the needs and obviously we will need to evolve the standards, introducing new capabilities such as who knows in the future make the protocols, the interfaces quantum safe for example. But there are basic topics that need to finish.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (17:47):
Thank you Juanma for that and if anybody wants to know more about the current state of the RIC and hasn't seen the panel yet, then I urge him to do so. We'll come to Rick in a moment, but first of all, let's go to Sushil, the RIC, A lot of work being done on the RIC. Sushil, but still some work to be done. What in your view is still required for it to fulfill its original potential?

Sushil Rawat, Telus (18:12):
I think my Vodafone colleague did touch upon that basic challenge that I have been saying, especially around the rig ecosystem in industry is about openness on near real time space. So the O one and E two interfaces are areas where definitely the standardization body has to do a better job. I mean they have done a great job in front door interface and whatnot, but when it comes to O one interface and E two interface, I think there more standardization, more active conscious effort needs to be put in place so that it become less impactful for suppliers or DU vendor to integrate with. But what I'm observing right now is because of lack of maturity of that interface is near real time. RIC is becoming more and more DU supplier play than a third party play in near real Time RIC, non realtime RIC, you'll see a lot of non ddu supplier being a platform player and application player, but when it comes to near real time, it's becoming more and more proprietary implementation becoming more of a DU supplier play. So I would like to see that interface becoming more and more mature so that a third party or independent near real real time can also be integrated with the DU directly.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:42):
Interesting. Thank you Sushil. Rick, I promised to come across to you From where you sit and your view of the market, RIC has promised a lot what is still required for it to fulfill this promise?

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (19:58):
Yeah, I love talking about the RIC because that's my name and it's always funny to hear your name called during these conversations so often. Anyway, I spot on, right, Juan and Sushil already nailed the E two interface is key. But I just wanted to add a couple things on that we need to make sure that the RAN vendors are actually motivated and will come on board because open FRONTHAUL is one thing well established, at least with most vendors. Some are still coming along, but if you look at open ran big picture, we've proven open interfaces work, we've proven step two is scale and performance that's well underway and being proven. And the third thing here is innovation. So with well over a hundred vendors participating in the O ran ecosystem, think of all the talent, the engineers, the money, big companies coming in and the way they can really innovate is to bring those A IML enabled apps over the top to work on anybody's ran. So standardization E two is critical. We can't have that be an excuse. It's not good enough. We need to get that going and then you have to have the vendors come along, all of 'em. Otherwise it's just we're going to miss out that big opportunity of what RAN can really bring in terms of innovation on top of what you could ever get on traditional ran.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (21:30):
Great. Thanks very much Rick. Some clear call to actions there from you. Thanks very much. Well, it's time to check in on our audience poll now for the open RAN summit. And the question we are asking you this week is, which are the most important areas of focus for the open ran community during the next 12 months? And you, there we go, used to see the real time votes coming in side of me here. It's early days on the voting, but it looks like, like the Peloton is slightly fractured, but there's no breakaway leaders just yet. Now if you have yet to vote, you've still got time to do so. So please do so now we will take a final look at the voting during tomorrow's live q and a show, right, we still have time for more questions. And here's one, can we realistically remove dependencies between silicon accelerators and layer one software to create an open L one such as that proposed by the multi G initiative? Rick, could we start with you? Can you shed some light on this?

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (22:48):
Sure, sure, I'd be happy to. When we think about open ran, we just talked about multi-vendor or multi multi-vendor on the radio side, multivendor on the RAN side mix and match open interfaces, E 2 0 1, all those things. But it goes beyond, that actually goes down into the DU for an example. So we've already seen today multiple layer one vendors coming into the market. In fact, there's been many integrations. Avenir, we've integrated four different layer ones and we can do that through an internal open interface. But how about programmability, right? So we have the new vendors coming in on layer one. You can mix and match those. You can deploy multiple layer ones in a single network. And we're seeing that, and that depends on 4G, 5G, massive MMO, non massive MIMO. How do you get the best TCO? You get to pick which one goes best with whatever use case.

(23:48):
And so that's coming along very, very nicely. And then if you think about multi G, one of the goals there is how do you make it programmable? How do you take a RIC or an application and actually modify parameters in real time, modify schedulers, how does that all work? That's going to take another step to do that in a multi-vendor environment. But that's where this is all heading. And some of the use cases that are being developed today is actually to do that. And if we have that openness between layer one and layer two or between ran integrator or ran software vendor and a chipset provider or a software provider, that's where we're going to see that. And that's just another, if I go back to my prior answer, it's just another way we can innovate not just between DU and radios or between non realtime RIC and I Iran. We can actually start to innovate deep into the stack and just imagine the possibilities there. So very exciting we're making by bringing in multiple layer one vendors by opening up these interfaces. We're on a path to get there. So I am actually very excited about the future there.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (25:00):
Good to hear Rick. Lots of innovation going on there. Sushil, what are your thoughts? Is this something that interests you as well?

Sushil Rawat, Telus (25:07):
I mean it's always good to have choices, right? As we all know, current software from most of the suppliers as very X 86 centric and operators are looking for other options, maybe ARM-based solution or other X 86 based architectures and custom built CPUs and whatnot. So for sure having openness on selection of silicon, not having dependencies on CPU silicon or accelerator silicon or specific silicon, that motivation is there from all the operators. Operators are talking to suppliers to support multiple CPU architecture. Now going to the open L one, I think that's a bit aspirational because we all know today Oran took us about eight to 10 years to get to the level of maturity stability in performance. So it took us about a decade to get here and to start working, to start having an open L one in production. It's probably going to take some time, but definitely a good area of innovation that basically serves the purpose of openness and disaggregation.

(26:29):
That one piece of software has made a lot of difference in terms of what kind of CPU, what kind of server you select. So from technical requirement point of view, from future innovation point of view, working on an open L one architecture is definitely promising and we should be looking at that, having it realistically done in shorter period of time. I think that's a bit of a long shot. I would assume that it would take a decent amount of time to stabilize this and whatnot. But yes, aspirationally a good vision and from operator's point of view, all of us probably, I can't say for all the operators, but at least for the one that I've been talking to, most of the operator do want that flexibility of selecting the hardware architecture in terms of silicon. So yeah.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:25):
Great. Thanks very much Sushil. It looks like there's a long roadmap ahead for open RAN. Randy, let's come across to you. What do you think of this?

Randy Cox, Wind River (27:35):
Well, I think as Suhil was speaking there, I would agree with him in terms of its aspirational in one sense, but as Rick also mentioned, there's a lot of different suppliers out there from an L one perspective, and I think this is where the disruption in the ecosystem can actually occur if those L one suppliers can actually pull this off. Now I do think it's a challenge quite frankly, and the incumbents, the two large incumbents as you know, this is going to be an area they're going to likely push back on hard because that's where their secret sauce is. And so they're unlikely to want to give that up. And I think the benefit and challenge at the same time is that the openness here will drive the disruptors to actually enter the market. And I don't really understand the question in one sense around the dependency on silicon because quite frankly there's always going to be a dependence on silicon in terms of performance and wanting to reap the benefits of new technology coming out. So there'll always be somewhat of a dependence there in terms of getting the benefits of new technology. But from a supplier perspective, I think this really drives disruption and competition into the ecosystem itself.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (29:00):
Great, thanks Randy. It's going to be interesting to see how it all pans out. This is excellent. We are getting through a lot of questions in this session and let's move on to see what else has come in from the audience. Okay, here's one about the ecosystem. The question is how many vendors can be integrated into an open ran environment? Now, I know we touched on this earlier in this summit about the differences between the data stack and the radio network, but are the limits perhaps technical limits or they have more to do with management complexities? Rick, what's your take on? Well, the extent of the ecosystem and vendors and what open rank and support,

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (29:47):
Well, I don't know if there's a number of, is it five, is it 10, is it 20, is it 30? I think what we've seen actually already in deployments is you can have horizontal vendors, for example, radio vendors and maybe a server vendor, a layer one provider as an accelerator, a couple software vendors and on up, right? All the way up to the core, your management, your OSS, your RIC RIC applications. So there's really no upper limit. And Dish Network has a couple dozen more vendors that are well managed. So it comes down to is it really how well does everything play together? So certifications are important to the industry. I think we mentioned we'll talk about that in a panel tomorrow.

(30:45):
And then I want to address the integration piece that's come up a couple times and it's less of a topic this year than last year I think in the industry or the year before, but we've seen proof in multiple deployments around the globe that on these well-defined interfaces, the burden doesn't necessarily have to rest with the operator. They still have choice. For example, I'm going to use these three radio vendors, so DU vendor, make sure this stuff works and that's a role they can take on. Chip said IODT, that's a role that can be left to the vendors to go do we've seen that work Well, server ca layer, I'm sure Randy can speak to this, but these integrations are already happening and the operator doesn't have to deal with that. They can pick and the vendors are happy to go make it work. And we've seen that happen multiple times.

(31:38):
So we've already established large multi-vendor environments. I'll go back, I'll say it again, it is so powerful for an operator to say, you know what, DU provider, you're not cutting it. I'm going to take this market or I'm going to bring somebody else in and overnight I can upgrade that because the hardware is common. So I said disaggregation between, I think was talking about this earlier that disaggregation between software and hardware is very powerful. It keeps people motivated, it brings in innovation hungry companies that want to disrupt and are disrupting. And so that's part of O Ran again, it's very exciting. We've seen 20 plus vendors in our network already working and there's parts that need more work like we talked about like E two and the RIC near real-time RIC. But that will come.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (32:28):
Great. Thanks very much Rick and thanks for mentioning the panel we've got tomorrow that you're on tomorrow. That's going to be a good one, the future of open ran. So don't miss that one. Randy, can we come across you and your thoughts as well, Rick set you up nicely there for some extra comments.

Randy Cox, Wind River (32:44):
Sure, no problem. I would agree almost with everything that Rick said there. In terms of the number, I would not want to guess at a number I think and anybody who's guessing at a number probably would be a bit of a stretch to be frank. I do think it depends on expertise and where you sit in the network. I will say at least from our experience with being a cloud provider in this space and when you look at the server, the hardware itself, the CAS layer if you will or cloud platform along with orchestration and analytics and then the RAN software, we find ourselves quite often in the middle, very much in the middle of the integration process between those three entities in the stack. And I think there's going to be a natural kind of rising of who is in the best position to actually perform that integration and determine what is working and what isn't. And quite often Wind River finds itself in the middle of that and so if I use that as an example, I think that could play out in other parts of the network as well where there will be a natural place where that activity occurs with a very strong interaction between the vendors themselves. But yeah, it's pretty exciting as Rick said, and lots of benefits and things we haven't even thought of that I think are going to come out of this whole openness in the network.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (34:25):
Great, thank you very much Randy. We've got about 10 minutes left so hopefully we can squeeze in a few more questions. And here's another one we've got, we haven't heard much about open ran security this year. Is that because all the previous issues and concerns have now been successfully addressed or were the early warnings about security somewhat exaggerated? Interesting. Juanma, can we perhaps start with your thoughts on the security question? We've had a couple of questions on security, so is this something still to be concerned about?

Juanma Canabal Muñoz, Vodafone (35:04):
Yes, obviously there were lots of concerns two years, one year ago. Some of them, I wouldn't say they were exaggerated, some of were of them were understandable, but some of them were some kind of hype trying to analyze the security breaches. Okay, well I have to say that working group or alliance working group 11 is making a great job because they are identifying hundreds of security breaches vectors and then they are identifying the elements of the network that could be impacted by those security breaches because main security breaches are caused by the complexity of the network, the different elements of the network and the interoperability among them. So they have compiled, they have gathered a full list of security breaches and the elements that can be affected and also they have suggested how to fix them, how to solve them. And they are working very close with the other working groups in or an alliance in order to improve security, especially in my opinion, in interoperability among the different parts of the network. Because in reality in open RAN we are following main specifications means security specifications and we cannot forget that we are based on 3D PP standards. Okay. So security is a matter of concern but I think a lot of great job is being done.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (37:28):
Great, thanks Juanma That's reassuring too here. Thanks for that update, especially on the work the O-RAN Alliance is doing. Couple more questions hopefully. Here's one, the panel earlier mention that Open RAN is matching in terms of performance parity with traditional RAN is open, ran also matching on service offerings as well. Sushil, can we come across to you for your thoughts on this question and where this one's going?

Sushil Rawat, Telus (38:04):
Sure. I think this also resonate with what we have been saying since we made our public announcement about adopting or and technology in our network in a MWC earlier this year we did see, I won't say parity in terms of performance oran in many areas even outperformed traditional ran. And the only reason we are able to adopt Oran today is because it provides the feature parity, right parity and that directly translate into capability of operator to provide services that they're providing today. At least those services should be met. So to answer that question directly open ran today, do have feature parity, do have performance parity and do have services parity. And not only that, I would like to add that with oan actually the capability of an operator to add new service to the network is actually much faster now. So the time to market for new service because of this hardware disaggregation now any new service introduction is not dependent on buying new hardware and rolling out that hardware into production basically or and provide us faster time to market when it comes to new service introduction. So that's how I see Open Ran adding value to operators monetization journey.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (39:32):
Great, thank you very much. Hel and one more let's come across to you for extra comments.

Juanma Canabal Muñoz, Vodafone (39:38):
Yes, I would like to add that Open RAN opens the door to a new concept for optimization. That is the idea of optimizing not at cluster level or cell level or network level is optimizing at user level Imagine services that are especially designed and especially optimized for one specific user. Okay, that's very innovative. Also, I do like to say that open ran can contribute to the expansion to the development of other industries, how we have a lot of data, network data that aren't still unused used. Those data can be used in use cases in industry use cases through interfaces that are being standardized in our alliance. For example, the way one interface opening the possibilities for innovation and for contributing to the economical growth of other industries.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (40:54):
Great, thank you very much Juanma and Rick, let's come across to you as well.

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (41:00):
Yeah, I just thought it'd be a good opportunity to build on the comments so far on this question with an example. So if you think about standalone technology for 5G Open Ran has the ability and is bringing innovation in that space for different types of services. For example, if I want to do Edge video analytics and I have hardware already deployed, say Nvidia GPUs and servers, because Nvidia is doing a layer one stack, we can go ahead and deploy a network on existing hardware on the edge. So it's actually that type of innovation. That's just one example. You have COT, servers deployed all over the place as another example that could be used for edge processing or downtime that might be a little bit more futuristic, but that's one of the areas where we start to combine some of these value added services and new services with the RAN in the network to really drive some innovation in the space. So I think that's just a couple of examples to build upon what the other folks have already said.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (42:13):
Thanks very much Rick, appreciate it. One final quick question to end today's show that it's just come in a few moments ago and it speaks to the generational aspects of Open Ran. The question is how is O Ran tackling the coming six G, let's call it how is Open ran addressing what comes beyond 5G, let's call it that. Will it keep openness across 4G, 5G and beyond? Can current open ran infrastructure support this evolution to whatever comes next or will it require another hardware replacement cycle from operators? Anybody want to comment on how generational agnostic open ran is? Let's go to social first and then we'll go around

Sushil Rawat, Telus (43:04):
I think six G I think I've been mentioning this throughout the q and a today, this disaggregation of hardware and software and the programmability that you get in the radios because of the BG base based implementation. Now this basically separate the hardware infrastructure from the software itself. So regardless of six G or five point 5G or any other generation hardware cycle or hardware refresh is independent of software generation now. So I would see six G and other generation of communication technology is going to standardize the open interfaces even more and the capability for operator to roll out those next generation of software will be much more faster than before because now operator will be able to roll out next generation of the technology without having to swap their hardware.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (44:07):
Thanks Sushil. That would be refreshing. Let's hope. So let's go around and Randy, let's come to you next.

Randy Cox, Wind River (44:14):
I think it was the maybe second question that you asked us around the immediate benefit and then the long-term benefit. And I think the long-term benefit is what you're getting at now in terms of six G. And I always look at this as a preparation if you will. What we're doing in open ran in 5G and the other Gs is a preparation for six G in the sense of the cloudification of a network is a new way of doing things and requires new organizations or different organizations to change the way they're doing things, to change the way they're operating their network, utilizing the benefits of automation, the benefits of being able to swap out vendors in a very easy manner. The services at the edge, all the topics we've discussed today are really in preparation for what will be required in six G. And so I think if operators are thinking, oh, I will wait to do this until six G, I think they're going to be behind and they're going to take a long time when six G hits the market for them to make that change or adapt and evolve to what's required for six G.

(45:32):
So I view this as now's the time to do this, take advantage of what we can today and be completely prepared for what is coming and the benefits of six G.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (45:44):
Good advice. Thank you Randy and Rick, let's come across to you for what will be our last question today. So Rick,

Rick Mostaert, Mavenir (45:51):
I am not sure I can say it any better than Sushil and Randy already did. That was two very good points last year before some of the larger vendors jumped on the OA bandwagon. Everybody said, well, they said this was a 60 technology, it wasn't really a 4G or 5g. So I think disaggregation, cloudification the way of working, the way you build a network. I mean I think this whole industry is catching up to the way the other industries have already evolved to the cloud and a way of working. We're bringing that to Telco and absolutely this is forward compatible with what's ever coming down the pipe because your platforms and your base is already there. It's software. It's not tied to hardware. So again, I can't, Shahi and Randy really covered all the points very well.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (46:48):
Great, thank you very much Rick and Juanma, final comments from you open, ran. Is it future compatible?

Juanma Canabal Muñoz, Vodafone (46:55):
Yes, of course. As my colleagues, Abia said, the foundation of based on the disaggregation of hardware from software, the cloudification and the upper interfaces are the perfect foundation for the six G for entering into ccca. Indeed European Commission is making a great effort in funding opportunities for CG development through the SNS young undertaking. And if you see the different projects in the different streams of research and investigation, you will find that almost 90% of the projects are based on the open RAN paradigm. I mean disaggregation of hardware and software cloudification and opening interfaces. So definitely open RAN is a very good starting point for the future for the six G.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (48:14):
That is very interesting. Thanks very much. Well, we are out of time now, so thank you all for joining us on this live program. Do remember to send in your questions for tomorrow's live q and a show as soon as you can. Don't leave it too late and please do take part in the poll. There is still time for you to have your say. Now here's the agenda for tomorrow day two of the summit and it includes a panel discussion that looks at the future of open RAN. You don't want to miss that. Until then, thank you for watching and goodbye.