Open RAN – evolving to fulfil its promise | Research Report

Open RAN is one of the most controversial areas of mobile technology. Its proponents claimed it would open the market to more companies, giving operators more choice at better prices and enabling them to avoid vendor lock-in. Others argue that it cannot match the performance of traditional RAN tech, is more expensive and has many technical hurdles to overcome.

Certainly, its progress in terms of deployment has been far slower than expected, not helped by the pandemic and disruption to supply chains. And its seems the multi-vendor aspect of this disaggregated approach has taken a back seat.

The end game is a programmable RAN platform for innovation. How realistic is this?

This research report by Mobile Europe looks at what open RAN is and is not – a source of considerable confusion in the industry.

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We looked to a number of people within operators for first-hand experience of the technology, including Rakuten Mobile, 1&1, Telenor Group, BT Group and of course, Vodafone plus leading analysts for their views on:

The maturity of the technology – and associated areas like virtual RAN and open cloud RAN

The work that they are carrying out in the field and labs now

Areas that need to progress like the radio intelligent controller (RIC) and service management and orchestration (SMO)

How performance and cost line up with those of traditional RAN deployments, although obviously, it’s early days for comparisons as there is no comparable scale, but the results are perhaps not the expected

What’s needed to make open RAN happen.

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