Open RAN

By Daryl Schoolar

During the last week of September, GSMA, along with its partner CTIA, held their annual North America conference in Las Vegas. Given the regional focus of the conference, the news and activity coming from it pales in comparison to the Barcelona version. However, that does not mean MWC Las Vegas is without value. We had several meetings that alone made the event worth attending. Plus, some companies still use the conference as a platform for announcements, while the exhibit floor provides guidance on the state of mobile communications in North America.

Of the major U.S. mobile network service providers only T-Mobile and AT&T had a show floor presence this year, but that did not mean other mobile providers didn’t make their presence know. Some of the operator highlights and messages from MWC Las Vegas 2023 are as follows:

AT&T: The company’s booth was dedicated to enterprise solutions, with connected vehicles occupying significant space. This is fitting given that Hardmon Williams, SVP, Connected Solutions for AT&T, used his keynote session to announce the company is now the connectivity provider for electric car manufacturer Rivian. Hardmon also discussed the frequent software updates of electric cars, which in turn increases the importance of network connectivity to support those updates.

MobileX: The competitive outlook for the U.S. prepaid market should intensify with the announcement by MobileX that it will launch a prepaid service exclusively through a retail partnership with Walmart. The driving force behind MobileX is Peter Adderton who has a track record of launching successful prepaid brands with Boost in the U.S. and Australia. Walmart’s interest in working with MobileX appears to be a competitive move against its online rival Amazon and its recently announced sales partnership with Dish’s Boost offering.

NTT DoCoMo: On the first day of the show the Japanese mobile operator announced it will be deploying an Open vRAN solution using NVIDIA GPU for hardware acceleration. NVIDIA will be supporting both the X86 and the ARM architecture. This is significant, as it not only gives NVIDIA a major Open RAN win, but will help overall create more Open RAN deployment options.

T-Mobile: The established U.S. mobile operator T-Mobile captured the most attention at the show with its announcement of a SIM based SASE offering using network slicing. This marks the first commercial service offering using 5G network slicing in the U.S. T-Mobile’s slicing will go commercial later this year. This is an important step in 5G evolution, helping to prove commercial viability of slicing. To help grow slicing, T-Mobile CTO John Saw announced that the company has made network slicing available nationwide to application developers. T-Mobile also took full advantage of the exhibit floor to show multiple wireless enterprise solutions and to host public sessions inside its booth. It was one of the liveliest spots on the floor.

Verizon: Verizon did not make any specific service announcements at MWC Las Vegas, but it did release a statement at the start of the conference highlighting its progress in transforming its network and the subsequent benefits. Those highlights included fiber network investments, mid-band and mmWave spectrum coverage, 5G fixed wireless access, and cloud-native network transformation. Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady used his time on stage at MWC to push back against FCC’s plan to reintroduce Net Neutrality, as a solution looking for a problem that does not exist. b

Of the three largest RAN suppliers in the region, only Nokia was on the floor. However, that doesn’t mean the conference lacked an infrastructure presence. Some of our vendor observations from the conference are as follows:

AWS: The company had a substantial presence on the show floor. Booth space was primarily dedicated to meetings and educational conversations regarding AWS’ telecom service provider and enterprise solutions. Digital transformation, and the role AWS can play in helping mobile operators with their transformation remains a strategic interest. Supporting that strategy, Sameer Vuyyuru, head of WW business development for communication service providers, gave a keynote presentation about how mobile operators are using GenAI to improve operations and customer experience.

Dell Technologies: From Dell’s hospitality suite overlooking the show floor the company promoted itself as the best option for operators looking for an IT hardware partner for building cloud-native networks. This includes servers to support Open RAN. Dell also participated in a private network demonstration with Airspan, Dish Networks, and Druid.

Nokia: As a sign of the shifting nature of network infrastructure, hardware specialist Nokia used its time at MWC Las Vegas to talk about software. Its message at the conference was “Network as Code” and participated in the open developer gateway conference held at the show. Nokia was also found at the GSMA booth demoing virtual reality to help drive interest in the mobile API opportunities.

Pivotal Commware: Pivotal Commware continues to focus on how to improve 5G mmWave economics through coverage extension and network planning and management tools. The company continues to make progress in this area indicating an increase in its U.S. deployments and that it is seeing its commercial opportunities expanding beyond the U.S.

Qualcomm: The company showed together with Quectel a 5G cellular module for laptops that can aggregate cellular and Wi-Fi signals. This is a nifty capability that focuses on the best performing link. In addition, Qualcomm continued its tradition of educating analysts about new market developments and technological innovations.

Beyond the specific vendors listed above, a significant percentage of vendor booth space remains dedicated to IoT, FWA, private networks, and indoor coverage solutions.

Realistically the U.S. version of MWC will never rival the Barcelona one. The U.S. version is mainly for North American operators and vendors while the one in Spain is global. That focus reduces participation. Vendors can bypass the show and still meet with customers and prospects. However, this does not mean the show should be written off. It remains a good source for one-on-one interactions and as a mid-year gauge of industry growth since Barcelona.

Japan’s Rakuten is the first global mobile network operators (MNO) to fully virtualize their networks, with millions of active customers on commercial service. Rakuten has taken their expertise of being a fully virtualized operator to create the Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), which packages its vendor portfolio and deployment expertise and markets it to other operators who also want to run their network in the cloud. Interestingly, the vendor product portfolio that is being sold is more extensive than what Rakuten has chosen to deploy. Based on news reports, Rakuten has already signed up 15 customers on RCP. The first publicly announced RCP trial partner is Ligado. A would-be US operator, Ligado owns spectrum in the United States that was previously used for satellite use. Up until recently Ligado has been involved in a fight with the Department of Defense over potential interference with GPS and NTIA, but the FCC sided with Ligado and allowed them to use their spectrum for commercial use.

Based on our research, the RCP universe consists of the following players:

Area	Company
4G Core	Cisco
Converged 4G/5G Core	NEC
Servers	Quanta
Service orchestration	Innoeye (acquired by Rakuten)
IMS/RCS	Mavenir
Open RAN software	Altiostar
4G Sub-6 GHz Radios	Nokia
5G Sub-6 GHz Radios	NEC
4G/5G Sub-6 GHz mmWave Radios and Software	Airspan

Qualcomm and Intel are also mentioned as RCP participants but apparently are mostly involved as silicon providers for their particular area of expertise.

Rakuten continues to use Innoeye and Altiostar, which it has purchased outright in Innoeye’s case or has an equity investment like Altiostar, for orchestration and Open RAN software, respectively. Mavenir continues to supply the IMS/RCS software and Quanta provides the servers.

RCP made several adjustments in its vendor portfolio when it added 5G support to the network. Rakuten switched from Cisco as a 4G packet core provider to NEC, which will work with Rakuten on building a converged 4G/5G core. NEC also replaced Nokia for the sub-6 GHz radios as Nokia only provides 4G radios for Rakuten. This change was surprising as the NEC 5G radios are actively cooled, whereas state-of-the-art radios are passively cooled. Rakuten did not switch mmWave radio providers which, Airspan continues to provide for 4G and 5G.

One of the powerful features of RCP is that an MNO can mix and match from any vendor in the RCP portfolio. If an MNO  prefers Nokia or Airspan as their radio vendor, they can use Nokia’s mmWave product for 5G or use Airspan for both mmWave and sub-6 GHz Airspan’s Open RAN software or use Altiostar’s software.

RCP fits into an interesting sweet spot in the market. Most large MNOs, especially in the United States, will chart their own path towards Open RAN based on how it fits into the current network. Changing or introducing vendors for such a significant network transition is like changing an airplane’s engines in midflight. Small operators, especially if they have already chosen Huawei equipment, are locked in. These operators typically have lean engineering and operations staff that are not trained or sized for such a significant network transition. This makes small operators dependent on large network providers as prime project managers and for vendor financing. Huawei’s growth to become the largest global provider of 5G equipment to MNOs has been based on both significant deployment and customer service capability to the point where almost every Huawei-powered network is a custom network with generous vendor financing packages. A side effect of the customization of each network is that it makes it difficult for other vendors to get a part of the network equipment. Medium-size MNOs and greenfield operators, especially if they are not dependent on vendor financing and the small rural MNOs in the United States who have to replace the Huawei equipment in their network and are collectively paid $1.9 billion to do so are a prime target for RCP. Rakuten’s offering lets MNOs jump to state-of-the-art software-defined networks with Open RAN. Software-defined networks are more flexible and cheaper to operate and due to the standardization of hardware, they are less expensive to buy.

Especially the rural operators who are replacing their equipment should invest in the technology of the future, SDN, and Open RAN, regardless of whether they choose RCP or a custom route, rather than invest in the past’s integrated hardware and software. For rural MNOs  who have to run their network with a lean team, SDN’s automation allows the network operation teams to be more efficient and effective. Before RCP, the path to SDN and Open RAN was quite daunting as, for example, Dish’s Charlie Ergen remarked during the Q4 2020 earnings call. RCP solves the complexity problem by allowing rural MNOs to use a working suite of products from another network operator. As a further bonus, several MNOs could combine their network operations and share a common core and operations team for additional cost benefits. Switching to SDN and Open RAN would also work with President Biden’s Buy American initiative. Several leaders in the field are American companies such as Airspan, Altiostar, Cisco, and Mavenir. For all too long, we have complained that there are no American telecom network equipment providers. Now the telecom industry has an opportunity to diversify its vendor base.