Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:23):
Hello, you are watching the Future of RAN Summit, part of our year-round DSP Leaders Coverage. I'm Guy Daniels and today's discussion looks at the open RAN reality in 2025. How has Open RAN technology evolved? What lessons have been learned from trials and early deployments and how is it now positioned within the wider RAN marketplace? Well, I'm delighted to say that joining me on the program today are Sarat Puthenpura who is Chief Architect Open Radio Access Network for the Open Networking Foundation. Warren Bayek who is Vice President Technology Office at Wind River, Javed Khan who is Senior Director 5G RAN Product Management for Rakuten Symphony and Robert Curran who is Consulting Analyst with Appledore Research. Hello everyone. It's good to see you all. Thanks so much for joining us on the program. A lot to talk about today as usual. Now we know the rain is evolving just as our summit is evolving. We have open RAN but we also have cloud RAN, virtual RAN, AI RAN and so on. Can we determine the nature of the overall run landscape today and where it's heading and how Open RAN fits into this picture? Robert, can we come across to you first? How do you see that the market at the moment and open RAN's position?

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (02:01):
Yeah, thanks Guy RAN is obviously a very mature market today. It's dominated by the top 3, 4, 5 players. Almost everything it goes into them, but it also has this generational procurement cycle seven to 10 years, which is a feature of original RAN. I think what we are seeing is that first the impact of cloud still trailing through and then the impact of open RAN on just adjusting the shape of that market. They're starting to be felt for sure, certainly in some of the behavior, both of the incumbent vendors and then in some of the startups, new entrants from adjacent spaces or completely new startups. It's a bit early for some of the AI RAN, some of the aspects of AI RAN to be felt in the marketplace. Very interesting ideas and concepts in there, but a lot of the original machine learning ideas are already being incorporated into the RAN market as it stands today.

(02:55):
So that's not necessarily something that's all that new. I think one of the features is that obviously we're moving from a world where brand new RANs are being built to much more optimization question and so I think there are some different demands that operators have for the RAN as they look at it now versus when they first started deploying two G 3G and 4G. Part of that's interesting things like energy, both absolute energy and energy efficiency, that's a range of different factors. We'll talk about that in a minute. That's certainly coming to play there. The other is the impact of software in the RAN. I wish that's going to change the architecture, change what you're looking for and just change fundamentally the whole idea of how quickly you can move in developing your RAN and building your RAN. So that's definitely something new and open RAN has a lot to say about that building on what's there in 5G, its authorization but also taking that to a more disaggregated concept as well.

(03:45):
There's a lot of interest in greater intelligence within noran using more of the data that's accessible and again, that's a key aspect of Open RAN exposing some of that data that can be used in different ways. So I think one of the key things that is emerging here is still that idea of optionality, which is baked into Open RAN while the incumbency and the major vision of operators, vendors are adjusting very, very slowly. There certainly is a lot of interest in this keyword optionality. People want to see where can they deploy different combinations, where can they address different form factors, different requirements for customers and that's really a lot of what Open RAN is really all about. My own view is Open RAN has really become into the mainstream of the RAN market rather than being a fringe thing and there's some different views about that but it it's a clear feature of the RAN market as it exists even today.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (04:35):
Great. Really useful insights there Robert. Thank you very much for that overview. And Sarat, I think we'll come across to you as well. Do you want to comment on the state of the RAN marketplace at the moment?

Sarat Puthenpura, ONF (04:47):
Yes, I think I see three fundamental aspects when you come to next Generation is concern. One is desegregation and openness. A second one is network function virtualization as much as possible. And third one is the injection of AI ML capabilities in the network where it's feasible and applicable. So the Open RAN gives a vehicle to achieve all three aspects and it is creating an ecosystem to capitalize the innovation and also the foundation for all the cloud native networks for the future. So open is more than just an architecture but it's something larger than that to promote activities and innovation in all three fronts.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:50):
Yeah, thanks very much Sarat. That is important isn't it? It's more than just the technology architecture. Thanks for that. Unless we have any other comments on the state of the RAN marketplace at the moment we'll explore how open run has changed and also why have the changes that we've seen been expected have there been a natural evolution or there been external pressures that have shaped the direction and growth of open run. And Sarat, I want to come back to you if it can because from your position where you sit, what are your thoughts on how Open RAN has changed and evolved?

Sarat Puthenpura, ONF (06:32):
Yeah, it has changed quite a bit since its inception and I first worked on Open RAN working for a large operator in the United States and we did deploy some of the initial capabilities back in 2020. So ever since that it has been involved quite a bit to multiple I would say factors. And I was reading this, the white paper written by Robert on TELUS. I think that's pretty enjoyable reading that from because that clearly shows that Open RAN has been evolving from a concept to something field deployable, mature, getting transitioned to a mature capability to be actually deployed and in-field. So one important thing is is that compared to other evolution of RAN, this is like a desegregation as a multi, so ecosystem building is very, very, very important and that has been evolving though it has been slow and that's an important differentiation among the previous evolution from 3G and IT a substantial differentiation.

(07:48):
So there are other driving forces which we originally envisioned when the open concept was first introduced, it was basically shown it's get the best of the technology without lock in and it'll get better, I would say leverage for operators to be more flexible and all that. But I think ever since that I see a lot of driving forces, which other than that one is I think the governmental I would say support has been increasing and that has been very important policies and the government, especially from United States and the uk, that has been a major, major, I would say catalyst to get this going and I think the geopolitical factors, these are the original things which we envision, but they're the driving forces at this point and also the new vendors are coming, traditional vendors are transforming. It's a lot of activities happening which we couldn't predict in the beginning, but I think the open run adoption as a really tangible way to implement next generation plan is driven by these factors which we originally didn't think about.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (09:12):
Yeah, thanks very much Sarat and as you say, there were many unpredictable factors when Open RANs first concede. Well Warren, let's come across to you and get your thoughts as well.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (09:23):
Yeah, I think a lot of what we've seen in Open RAN was predictable. Some of the obvious things were everyone knew that this would be a seismic shift in terms of operational difficulty. Everyone knew as we brought in multiple vendors across an ecosystem, the role of sis, whether it's internal sis expertise within the telcos or SI requirements brought in from externally, integrating an ecosystem across multiple partners is much more difficult than deploying traditional RAN, right? Where one vendor owns everything from top to bottom. So that was sort of expected. Along with that I think came originally was I think there was a little bit of an acceptance if you will of lower KPIs, lower some energy efficiency, give back, those sorts of things no longer exist, right? All of this virtual open AI open RAN expects par if not better KPIs, par if not better energy efficiency as we bring in.

(10:26):
I think someone mentioned earlier some of the AI capabilities of optimizing networks and optimizing radio efficiencies. Those are now expected things in open RAN and that's a little divergent I think from the original Zerat mentioned the government influence that kind of came as a little bit of a surprise. A lot of the pushback against the Huawei ZTE has forced this market a little bit as has the stepping in of the UK and European in the toolbox in the United States. The 5G coalition and the opening coalition funding has really helped push the industry toward this standard a little more. And I do think the some of these were expected, some were external, a lot of the expected things have come to pass. We've been at this several years as someone earlier mentioned, three, four years and a lot of the initial issues with open RAN have kind of gone away.

(11:21):
The other thing that happens naturally in any open architecture discussion is over time it evolves to fit the market, right? The open RAN specs for instance have evolved not in some laboratory environment but from actual vendors who are doing these things every day. So the specs have matured to the point that they're deployable Now it's easy for the vendors to step in and focus on these plug fests, which has become another mainstay of the open RAN in industry and I think these are great aspects of Open RAN that make it a lot more possible for the vendors to start taking advantage of the promise of open RAN.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (12:06):
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much for those comments there Warren. Well, unless there's any other comments about how Open RAN is evolving and changing, I think we should move on to likely future scenario, which is six G. We've been doing a series of reports on the preparation for that here at telecom tv and one of the findings that we got was that open run is highly likely to be incorporated in some form or another in the standards from the get go. Does that mean therefore that there are operators who are still on the fence a bit undecided that maybe you're holding back on a open RAN deployment decision or a wide scale open RAN deployment decision simply because it's waiting for the next major cellular refresh cycle? Warren, I do want to come back to you on this one because it kind of picks up nicely from what you've just been saying. So what are your thoughts on that?

Warren Bayek, Wind River (13:11):
Yeah, that's a great question Guy and I'll have kind of two ways to answer this. One is how I would like to see it play out and two is how it likely will play out. I guess I agree with the premise of the question in that yes, six G or whatever we're calling it next G will clearly be fully virtualized and will have open REM principles as natively as part of the deployment. That said, I do think there will be a number of operators and whether it's full scale across their entire network or in parts of their network, massive MIMO or dense urban centers who will be very slow to adopt open RAN and virtual RAN architectures. Now prior to the next gen, I do think there is a compelling reason for telcos and they are seeing it now to make the move. Now part of the reason is some of the things we've talked about, which is some of this complexity we've talked about, you can't learn that from other people, right?

(14:13):
We can all read white papers, we all share in this industry. Frankly, our competition in the open RAN space is not each other, it is the existing traditional RAN deployments. So we're happy to share amongst each other in a lot of ways. That said, some of this learning has to be done by experience, right? The telcos actually have to deploy this. They have to see what problems they run into in their network. They have to see the best way to optimize open, RAN to fit their operational model, their TCO models, the specific things that make sense to 'em. They have to see ways that they can monetize this eventually, right? By virtualizing the edge, you're allowing new applications and new use cases to be run at the far intelligent edge that can't happen with traditional RAN. So that's something new that the telcos are just sort of learning how to play a part in.

(15:10):
The sooner that happens for telcos the less they'll have to adapt once the next gen does happen. So they'll be not behind the curve in 2030 or whatever year. We do think that's going to happen, but they'll actually start taking advantage of some of this virtualization and open RAN technology and architecture today and then when the next generation happens, it will be a very easy uplift for them to take advantage of the reasons that we're going virtual at the far edge because we've talked about this in past panels and part of what has to happen at the telco level in order to really partake in this new world technologies and this new intelligent edge economy is a reworking, if you will, of the workforce. The internals of the telco workforce have to up rev to be able to be more cloud native, more virtual, more AI centric, all the kinds of things we've talked about in the past. The sooner they start doing that, the sooner that they'll hit the end target. If telcos wait for the next G to get that started, they're going to miss the boat. And a lot of the telcos that have already started adopting this, a few of the big ones in North America like Boo formerly Dish and Rakuten has been a big part of this. Vodafone is starting to really start building this up now. They're going to have a massive advantage if the other telcos don't partake in this technology today.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (16:41):
Great, thanks very much Warren. You make a very compelling case there as to why Telco should move today if they're still dithering and waiting. Robert, let's come across to you. Do you see any, I dunno, kickbacks or restrictions or do you see that it's more of a case of no, we're going to do it now. We're not going to wait for the next big refresh cycle?

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (17:04):
Yeah, it's interesting. Warren raises a bunch of good points there. I think look, the reality check here is that six G is getting further away in the future compared to what we thought six G might be when we're talking about 4G for example, just looking around in the conversations at Mobile Congress, the kind of citadel of what's happening in wireless six G is something that's going to happen at least a decade away. So just I'm kind of echoing more on this point. There is so much more to be done. There's so much more opportunity and so much more potential to do new stuff. The two great big things that have impacted this are software first and then ai. Both of those are seismic shifts on their own and telecom is still just processing those things. I think a network strategy that says we've just done 5G, we're going to wait until six G is a crazy idea, you might as well wait for flying cars.

(18:00):
I mean it's not quite that extreme, but it's clear and I'm not demeaning the work going on in six G specifications. I'm making the point that at the moment it's extremely arcane work, engineering work, it's not commercial work and yet we have all this other opportunity to improve customer experience, improve efficiency, improve agility in networks and so on. So I think there is a risk, there always was a danger going back about two years that the whole open RAN discussion would be kicked into the long grass. We say let's make that part of six G and not do anything about it. I think the reality is that that creates too big of a gap between where we are today and whatever six G might be in commercial terms in terms of customers and what it means for customers. All the heavy lifting's already been done.

(18:49):
It was done partly in the 5G specification work as some of the 4G specification work and it's being done right now in some of the open RAN work and AI machine learning. So I guess much I'd like to have contrasting views in discussion. I think Warren's perspective is pretty much the right one. There'll always be people who will hold out for something and find some reason not to do things. But I think over time and particularly when you add in some of the proof points that are coming on stream now, particularly from Brownfield operators like Telus, I think it'll be hard to resist the idea that you should be switching tracks from switching the points on a line from a traditional RAN to a more open, we'll see an open compatible RAN strategy and then we'll see an open RAN strategy.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (19:35):
Great. Thanks very much Robert. Well we know that the release 21 release 20 studies that will lead to six G are just starting, but as you say, five years is a big period of time. An awful lot can happen. There's a lot of potential and opportunity remains for telcos in that five year period. I'd like to move on to another question now and I kind of doubling back to what was mentioned earlier and I think it was Warren who mentioned earlier that a lot of the specs have matured from what we've seen in the field as opposed to in the lab. We've hopefully learned a lot from the introduction of Open RAN. But Javed, I'm going to come to you now. I'm going to ask what are the major lessons that you think we've learned and how might these impact the future of RAN?

Javed Khan, Rakuten Symphony (20:21):
Yeah, so the company I worked for Rakuten was one of the first to build out an open RAN network in Japan. And that has been a huge learning for us and I'm sure it applies to across the industry. The difference was in Japan with this new network, it was a greenfield deployment so there were no legacy hardware RAN to upgrade, but even then because we had a lot of different vendors involved from radio vendors, the cloud platform server vendors, so integration was a big challenge and we've essentially overcome that and seeing that in other deployments as well in different parts of the world where there was a steep learning curve to learn basically to come up to speed with how virtualization for example, benefits the system, how automation could be used to simplify the integration, simplify deployment, simplify operation. So a lot of CapEx and OPEX savings that came from virtualization from disaggregation of this software and use of COS hardware, we were able to prove that it's possible to build a viable system that can provide the same better performance than existing existing legacy based RANs.

(22:05):
So some of the learnings being able to integrate a lot of different moving parts from the hardware to the cloud platform to the software and that required, that's where a lot of the system integration companies and system integrations play a very useful part to bring the solution together and that helps the operators because a lot of them just steeped in the traditional ways of working and trying to address this huge conglomeration of many different players was a challenge in the beginning. And I think they've overcome that by bringing learnings within their own organizations and also relying on system integrators to bring the solution together. One of the other big challenge for open RAN is the radio ecosystem. The whole promise of open RAN was to drive down the TCO by involving a lot of in new players who can bring new expertise and expand the ecosystem. So getting radio players into this ecosystem was an initial challenge that required a lot of iot and recently with a lot of funding from different government organizations, for example in the US through NTIA funding, a lot of work has been done to do iot between radio vendors and baseband vendors and this has helped quite significantly and will help to simplify the deployment to enable a mature ecosystem.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (23:57):
Great, thanks for those insights, Javed. As you said, there were a lot of challenges that needed to be overcome and lessons learned in the process of doing so. Let me come next to Sarat and we will get your thoughts on what lessons we've seen in deployment so far.

Sarat Puthenpura, ONF (24:15):
Yes, thank you. So this is an important topic. There are many lessons we learned for the last two years, some painful, but as far as I see, lemme focus on few important things. So as I mentioned before, there's 5G in a desegregated architecture is a multi-vendor play than ever before and it needs an ecosystem and ecosystem building takes time and I think the timelines were grossly underestimated. And the second one is the integration. There are significant more challenge in integration that was also somewhat overlooked and then that was just to come through actual deployment and then see hey, this is a problem. And then we had to go back and drawing the board and so on and so forth. And I think Juan mentioned that operational expertise needed a new set of expertise to operate this network, the traditional line operation. So that's lack of skilled workforce to pick up the ball and run that did ham a lot that's still ing and also the market forces are not enough to drive that adoption.

(25:32):
And I mean today as we all agree that today the workforce is LT network and what LT cannot do with 5G is doing today, it's what is the killer application. This question is still being answered. And also when you develop standards, especially in a situation like this, you need to put infuse more practical conservation into that that's happening. That definitely is happening. So all this going to have impacts as far as I can see as we're moving forward in the future of Open. First is I think we need a greater focus on operational automation because these networks are more complex to operate and those are done, the business cases, the cost alone, the capital cost alone with getting vendor lock, that's not enough drive this, we need to get the operational cost also to be brought down at least the has to be achieved. This is a place where AI ML capabilities can greatly help. Another thing is that you need to have balance approach between openness and what is proprie. We cannot have everything open. That's always a tension that's happening. So we need to have a strike right balance and move forward from that. And also workforce training. We need to focus on creating more opportunity for workforce training. That's where the open source become a big, big help.

(27:07):
And also the government should continue to support and I mentioned NDA has been a big, big help to that. In fact, open Network Foundation has been a of the ND funding that has been very helpful and that has been a big force behind that. And finally we need to have industry alignment before we even get into the next generation. We talked about 6g, let's align the industries and priorities and let's put up a technology first and then try to solve, find a problem. So just put the other way this in my humble opinion, these are the kind of things that we learned and would be influenced in the future of or adoption.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (27:51):
Sarat, thank you very much. Great observations there you you've highlighted some key points that we need to be extremely aware of. I'll come to Warren in a moment, but Robert, let's pick up with you next.

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (28:04):
Just a couple of quick things. I think both of the previous speakers have covered a lot of the learnings. Something I think is very important is for the industry to realize that we are accelerating that yes, there is a lot to learn, but the companies who have been doing this work have been learning it extremely fast. That's one part because again, part of this is software. Yes, I know some of it is due technology. Yes, I know some of it's still under development, but the industry is learning fast. And that's really the second part, which is that this is not just individual vendors learning how to do things. A key part of Open RAN is an entire community of people. Some of that is fostered by government, some of it is fostered by vendors, some of it's fostered by operators. Integrators are in the mix as well.

(28:48):
But I think that's really something quite distinctive in the evolution of the industry. There's always been a degree of collaboration click around standards. But I think what we've seen over the last three, four years and certainly, I mean Rakuten has been one of the spearhead companies as Dave tell us others, the amount of sharing and learning going on in real time I think is really quite impressive. And now when we look at for example, some of the way in which New Silicon coming out, new ai, different issue in some ways and the speed which that's developing, I think there's a massive acceleration taking place in this field in a way that we haven't seen it before. It's not to undermine the challenges, they certainly exist there, but the rate at which the industry is learning I think is one of the lessons that meta lessons to take away about how this industry can move and how it can progress.

(29:34):
I think the other point I want to make in terms of lessons learned, again, going back three years or so, there was certainly quite a lot of scaremongering, maybe too strong a word, but certainly a lot of pushback on things like security and performance. And over time all of those hurdles have been pushed over. Now we're talking about parity or better, I think Lauren mentioned the phrase earlier, that's a pretty commonplace expectation. So one of the lessons was that the fear that we had in the early days has really dissipated entirely. Now those concerns are not raised anything like the same degree that they were three years ago. I think the ambition is higher for open RAN perhaps even than it was back then certainly among Brownfield operators because you have to get to parity Plus before you do this there is no compromise. But I think that's one of the lessons to take away. You don't have to compromise with open RAN. You can set the highest standards in every field, performance, security, everything else, automation, and that can be your North Star. That's what pulls your programs through.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (30:35):
Very interesting, Robert, thanks very much. Yeah, as you say, it was only a few years ago that we had all these concerns and fears and they're dissipated now. Interesting to see how this is going to go. But Warren, let's come across to you for your observations on the lessons that we've learned so far.

Warren Bayek, Wind River (30:52):
Yeah, thank you. I guess that the previous panelists definitely highlighted a lot of them. I just want to drill down into a few that we've had a lot of experience seeing this happen and the criticality of these going forward is what's going to drive I think the success of any of these open architectures. The first is we've heard the word ecosystem a lot and that's a very important thing to focus on. And then those of us who have been in this industry for multiple decades know that anytime open standards come out, we can define a standard to the nth degree of specificity. But the truth is once two vendors who are implementing different sides of an API of a standardized API get together, there's always something that we interpreted differently that we didn't cover, that I didn't plan on you doing. So the ability of the ecosystem partners on the interface, the interface interjections of this open RAN architecture, the ability of those ecosystem partners to work together as early as possible is one of the critical things that we've learned that Wind River has learned through deploying several of these open RAN and virtual RAN architectures.

(32:03):
The more we can work with network vendors, VDU vendors that earlier, that's the critical piece that's made these programs successful. And the other thing I've heard a lot is AI and automation. And while I agree that is a critical piece to what's going to make this work and it is already happening, of course the automation in terms of operations is a very important part. Pushing that back even further, again, going back to the ecosystem pushing AI and automation all the way back to design and all the way back to initial virtualization and initial design criteria for the various ecosystem partners is another thing that we've learned is a very important part of making sure the open RAN deployment in the end is successful. So while I agree with everything that's been said here, I just want to kind of raise the bar for everyone to think this is an ecosystem play largely and the ability of the ecosystem partners to work together to one goal as opposed to considering each other. As I've mentioned this a few times already, we're not mortal enemies anymore. We're building, we're frankly building a bigger pie. So working together as we've been doing very well the last few years is a critical piece to making open RAN successful.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (33:21):
Thanks so much Warren. And there's that focus on collaboration again and working together, which brings me to my final question for today. I'd like to ask you how you would like to see open RAN, evolve, maybe not too far out, but certainly over the next couple of years, how you'd like to see it evolve. And Robert, I'd like to start with you because you spoke a few minutes ago about the degree of collaboration we're seeing. You also alluded that a long pass, a period of accepting compromises. Now we don't have to do that. So how would you Robert like to see open run evolving?

Robert Curran, Appledore Research (33:58):
Yeah, a few aspects here Guy. I think there's a challenge. There's an inevitable tension between the economies of scale that we get with standardization and some of the ideas we've talked about on this panel, like a vibrant ecosystems of participants, all of whom have enough business to thrive. That's going to be something that we've got to resolve over time, but that's what I would like to see. What's good for the industry is having operators, having access to the best available technology, the best choice optionality I mentioned as a keyword rather than an industry that is stuck in any kind of seven to 10 year cycle of iteration. So that's got to be something I would like to see access to more technology. A key part of that is the data side of things. So as long as the data it touched on, we wanted to go into the functionality of APIs, but as long as the data is getting exposed and we get an innovative way to use that data in clever ways, that will be a good thing.

(35:01):
I think it's now inevitable. Open RAN and cloud RAN are pretty much kind of bound up together. They mean slightly, they mean very different things, but in practical terms they come together pretty much as one. So I think that's a kind of inevitable convergence there. I think finally, I think the goal for Open RAN should be to make sure that what Open RAN is providing is visibly better for customers first and visibly better for operators second. And I mean in that order, I think as we start to see particularly in Brownfield context, the influence of Open RAN and the experience of Open RAN having a measurable effect on what customers are experiencing, I think that will help a lot in the open RAN case. So it's not just a substitution that's undetectable, it's quite the reverse and kind of create that end customer demand for what Open RAN can do. So I think that would be what I'd like to see.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (35:57):
Yeah, I think there'd be a lot of support for those goals. Thanks very much Robert and Sarat, let's come across to you next. How would you like to see open RAN evolving in the next couple of years?

Sarat Puthenpura, ONF (36:07):
Yes, I see this evolution happening in three fronts. I think we discussed quite of that. The first one is a technical evolution. The technical evolution means that we need to achieve parity and even better with open brand what has been achieved by traditional plant. So there should be a compelling reason to use that For the technical point of two good examples of one is energy consumption. The segregated network typically consume more energy, but there are ways to bring it down that more so we need to get that under check. And also the integration complexity which we talked about before, that needs to be brought down. Also, I'll just give two examples of technical evolution. The second one is again, we discuss ecosystem development. It's not a single one to play. It's open standards. It's community has to come together to pull this off and that again, need to create an equilibrium where the competitive landscape reach some level of an equilibrium to have a good coexistence of various players from competitors. And finally, the operational improvements, the operational improvements is very, very important. So those who have done the business cases of this, you could see that look, the price of the capital expenses probably can be brought down, but the operational complexities associated operational costs including energy costs tend to be getting higher. It's not in the place where it's, so this is where the AI ML capabilities and automations in general can make a big impact. So I see this evolution, the technical, the ecosystem and operational firms see significant evolution to get it universally accepted.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (38:08):
Great. Thanks very much for those observations Sarat. Thank you for that. And Warren, let's come across to you. How would you like to see open RAN evolving?

Warren Bayek, Wind River (38:17):
So thanks again Guy. So the previous panel, this question I think covered the kind of technical and telco focus. I'm going to answer differently. I'm going to answer it from a consumer perspective. As someone who uses, and I'm sure we all do, who uses 5G and who uses my phone 23.8 hours a day, I really don't need a better phone experience. I don't need better connectivity, I don't need better internet or faster internet. What I hope we get out of open RAN is a better user experience in general. So not a better phone experience, but a better life experience. And I know I do tend to be hyperbolic, but I'm going to go there. We are enabling an intelligent cloud edge much as we enabled a core cloud years and years ago. What I hope to see out of Open RAN is a way that we as an industry use the compute resources at the far intelligent edge in a way that fundamentally changes our lives.

(39:28):
And I really think we're on the cusp of being able to do that. We have billions of connected devices that this technology could enable. I think someone mentioned it earlier, what's the killer app? Frankly, I have no idea. And no one on this panel does and probably no one listening to this panel discussion does. But I guarantee you of the 5 million developers in the world and startup companies and those folks, someone there does have way more than one killer app. That's the enablement of that ecosystem and that human, the human capital, that's the part. That's what I want to see open RAN, unlock. That to me is the vision of the evolution of Open RAN.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (40:16):
Well, nicely put. Thank you very much indeed. There's so much riding on open runs, a lot of potential out there, but we must leave it there for now and I am sure we will continue this debate during our live q and A show later on. For now though, thank you all for taking part in the discussion. If you are watching this as part of our future of RAN Summit, then please send us your questions. Hey, if you've got the killer app, let us know and we'll try and answer them in our live q and a show, which starts at 4:00 PM UK time. The full schedule of programs and speakers can be found on the telecom TV website, which is where you'll find the q and a form and also our annual poll. Question for now though, thank you for watching and goodbye.