All About Open RAN: The Next Revolution In The Telecom Industry

In today’s world of commerce, one of the key factors that catapult businesses to the forefront is innovation. The telecommunication sector has particularly seen innovation happening in leaps and bounds over the last few years. One such area of development is the Open Radio Access Network or more commonly known as Open RAN.

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Connecting subscribers to the access providers is at the core of any telecom business. The advent of Open RAN can revolutionize the process of building mobile access networks. It allows mobile operators and network providers to connect with a larger subscriber base, thus spreading their reach considerably.

In this article, we take a look at what exactly is Open RAN and how it can benefit network providers to build a more robust mobile access network.

What Is Open RAN?

Open RAN is a vendor-neutral and global partnership based open ecosystem of RAN solutions. The core system is based on disaggregation at both the software and hardware levels. This disaggregation is seen on processor-based general-purpose network platforms. This initiative was launched by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and is based on GPPP (General Purpose Processing Platforms) principles. The basic idea of Open RAN is implementing a robust open interface between network components using software and hardware-defined functions.

A pertinent survey by Mavenir shows that of all the mobile operators they interviewed, everyone is willing to commercially implement openRAN in their networks. About 43% are open to replacing their current vendors in favor of Open RAN. These numbers show a promising future for this technology.

Open RAN Features

There are several architecture options available in Open RAN, like the following:

• An integrated RAN system with disaggregated hardware and software components.
• A split RAN system with separate RU (Radio Unit) and BBU (Base Band Unit) with either DU (Distributed Unit) or CU (Central Unit).
• A split RAN system with separate RU, DU, and CU.

These solutions can be implemented on both bare-metal and containerized or virtualized platforms. The overall flexibility of the Open RAN solutions offers a unique advantage of a highly diverse ecosystem. Vendors can choose the options that best suit their network deployment needs, thus creating stronger mobile access networks to cater to their customers.

Benefits Of Open RAN

Let’s take a look at some advantages of implementing Open RAN for mobile access networks-

• As mentioned previously, Open RAN offers excellent network diversity and allows telecom companies to be resilient in intense competition.
• Implementation of Open RAN will allow mobile operators to cut their costs of building networks. This is due to the fact operators will have the opportunity to work with new vendors. The vendor-neutral nature of Open RAN aims to reduce the dependency of operators on a small group of vendors, thus reducing the huge expenses currently associated with building network infrastructure.
• Open RAN implementation will encourage the software-based innovation of radio access networks.
• Upgrade cycles will become faster with the increased use of off-the-shelf hardware components. This will drive the economies of scale and make upgrades cheaper over a time period.
• Further innovation and application of cloud automation methodologies and operating systems will be made possible for mobile access networks.

The Way Forward

In the present world, mobile networks connect more than 5 billion users and generate service revenue of over $1 trillion annually. The advent of Open RAN implementation in mobile access networks will make this industry more robust and improve the service quality meted out to the subscribers. The challenge now lies in the development of suitable products that operators can use to integrate and deploy this technology in their live networks. However, the good thing is that the work is underway with trial runs already happening across several global geographies.

Learn more about small cells deployment with Symphonica, no-code provisioning automation for the entire lifecycle of services orchestrated across multiple networks and multiple technology domains.