Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (00:20):
Hello, you are watching our series on the open RAN Vanguard inside the TELUS Open RAN Transformation. I'm Guy Daniels. And this special series of programs will give you an exclusive inside view of the open RAN transformation at telus, sharing the Telco's vision and its journey as it unfolds. Well over the past few months, we've been bringing you regular installments, each looking at key aspects of Open RAN and how TELUS is deploying and using this transformational technology. As one of the industry's first major telcos to deploy Open RAN throughout its network, TELUS provides a valuable viewpoint on open RAN's capabilities In this program, we are going to look back on the first year of open RAN deployment and discover what TELUS was able to do differently and reveal the key learnings from the past 12 months. And I'm pleased to say that joining me to explain more is my special guest Nazim Benhadid, who is the Chief Technology Officer at Telus. Hello Nazim, very good to see you. Thanks so much for taking part in our program. And let's start at the beginning. If we go back a year or more, what did Telus consider initially would be the primary business benefits of an open RAN or V RAN strategy and has this view evolved over time?

Nazim Benhadid, TELUS (01:49):
Hello Guy and thanks for having me. So we first started considering ORAN from a pure technology evolution perspective, but then we were faced with a strategic choice as we had to swap our network into a new vendor. And when we looked at that, the first consideration for us was to swap to a future ready network, if I can call that we didn't want to swap like for like we wanted to swap for the future. And we looked at the vendor ecosystem, what's available, what's not, what are the roadmaps as well as the TCO and O RAN became the logical answer to our question to a certain extent. Initially it was TCO and future proof. As we evolved over time, we found other benefits. For example, we had already built a virtualized multi-tenant cloud for our core applications and build on bare metal as a service and we found that we could reuse a lot of the capabilities we put in place in terms of tools and automations and skillset and so on and so forth. So all in all our experience since we started the deployment has just confirmed that our decision was the right one.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (03:27):
Good to hear. And I know a lot of other operators will be pleased to hear that as well. You mentioned that you were looking initially at a future proofed strategy. How has Telus's experience with Open RAN influenced its perspective on the technology's potential to actually meet future 5G requirements and looking ahead five, six years as we start to implement what will be six G?

Nazim Benhadid, TELUS (03:55):
So O-RAN, open standards, more innovation, more players, better TCO, it's simpler, it's more modular. And we believe that in our industry with the services being commoditized and the traffic growing at an increasing rate, it's the only way it enables innovation such as AI RAN, r-apps, x-apps. I can't stress enough how the TCO is better and as a whole, some components for us are really important. Open radios are. We were able to compact our radios by a third, roughly, which makes a big difference when you look at civil costs, smaller radios, multi-band, more technology innovations in them. All of this, all of these features we believe are critical for 5G-Advanced and 6G, and O-RAN to us - vRAN and O-RAN - are the foundation for those future technologies.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:03):
And can I also add what about ai? Because at the moment there's a lot of talk on AI RAN as part of the future transformation path from 5G to six G. Does O RAN help with the integration of AI in the radio access network as well?

Nazim Benhadid, TELUS (05:21):
We believe it does with standard framework, whether it's SMO or rec, it allows for better integration and more importantly, it allows for common standard ways of ingesting the data, processing the data, making the decisions and so on and so forth.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (05:40):
Fantastic. Thanks so much Nain for clarifying that. And there's a lot of interest on TCO and a lot of people really keen to find out exactly what the benefits are as we move into the future. But can I also ask about the issue of scaling open round? What's your outlook for the scalability of Open RAN for large commercial networks? Maybe not today, but perhaps in the next three or five years?

Nazim Benhadid, TELUS (06:05):
I think scalability is already here. Look, we plan to swap the remaining of our network, so 50% of our network in the next two to three years, and we plan to be a hundred percent open RAN by 2029 when it comes to scale, the way I think about it is as follows, the traditional telecom compute represents a fraction of a fraction of the compute in the world. Continuing with purpose built proprietary hardware and software prevents us from taking advantage of the economies of scales achieved by the IT industry in general. When we first started, we were wondering where the barriers would be or where the choke points would be. We found that choosing the right ecosystem of partners helps with integration that it's something that any or many companies can do. On our end, we're very open, we're happy to share test results, deployment results, performance results, or an advocate for this ecosystem because we truly believe that it is the way forward. Telecommunication services are a matter of sovereignty for us, for the western world, and to a certain extent we're fallen behind in terms of innovation and we believe that Open RAN will bring back innovation at the forefront of telecom. I'm really not worried about the ability to scale. Every component of Open RAN is commoditized to a certain extent. The integration with the right ecosystem of partner is something that we have achieved and others have achieved. And yeah, the TCO is better. So it's layers of benefits upon benefits upon benefits for our industry.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (08:12):
Well, all sounding very positive. And again, you mentioned TCO there and partners and selecting the right partners and working with the right partners has been paramount. Now, as you mentioned at the start, it's been about a year since TELUS announced Canada's first deployment of Open RAN, and as we've heard, you've done tremendous work since then. Can you elaborate a bit more on how TELUS is leading the industry adoption here and your advice or recommendation to other players in the open RAN ecosystem?

Nazim Benhadid, TELUS (08:41):
Look, we're not afraid to take risks. We are a big company in Canada, but a small company when you compare us to American or European or Asian peers, and we compensate for that through innovation and risk taking, but we take a structured approach to risks. So as we were rolling this out, we had a very structured process with gating and clear deliverables for each one of the gates. As we brought this service into production, you've probably heard from me or from my team saying that we find that the performance KPIs today with ORAN are better or on par or better than traditional RAN. We really advocate for the technology. We share each and every one of our learnings with our industry peers as much as we can. And we believe that as an industry we have to be more opinionated in terms of having consistent and open standards through the ORAN Alliance or others three gpp and so on and so forth. And yeah, we believe that the substitution costs all in are acceptable and that the benefits that we get from the technology adoption are worth the effort.

Guy Daniels, TelecomTV (10:26):
Well, you've really shown what is possible with open RAN, but we must leave it there for now. Naim, thank you very much for sharing your views with us today. Now, if you enjoyed this program, then please watch the other videos in the Open RAN Vanguard series. We have several interviews, deep dives and panel discussions with more still to come. And to make sure you don't miss the release of these videos, please register your interest and sign up at our website and this is also where you'll find further information including links to all related content. We will be back later this month with our final panel discussion where we'll wrap up the whole Vanguard series. For now though, thank you for watching this latest program on the TELUS Open RAN transformation. And until next time, goodbye.