Okay everybody, stop grumbling about open RAN not going your way. It’s actually motoring along quite nicely if you look at it carefully.
Vodafone allowed their vendors to announce the results of the "Spring 6" RFP process recently, and each vendor has something to crow about:
- Nokia won a share of Vodafone Three’s 5G network upgrade in the U.K., providing radio access network (RAN) equipment for 7,000 sites as well as core networks.
- Ericsson won a share of VodafoneThree also, with a slightly bigger contract in RAN and core networks covering 10,000 sites. Ericsson also continued as the sole RAN supplier across Ireland, Netherlands and Portugal and kept their share in Germany, Romania and Egypt.
- Samsung won a significant virtual RAN (vRAN) contract in Germany. I don’t think that I am allowed to say how many sites, but to be clear this is a big contract — and it’s one of the biggest vRAN contracts to date.
All of that is pretty routine: vendors are announcing their share of a multi-national RFP process. But, here’s the part that caught my attention: Ericsson also announced that Germany will be the first market to deploy Ericsson’s non-realtime RAN intelligent controller (RIC) and rApps, for later roll-out to the rest of Europe.
This announcement is significant, because (reading between the lines) it means that Ericsson is providing the RIC and service management and orchestration (SMO) software for non-Ericsson RAN equipment.
And there it is….open RAN is accomplishing exactly what the operators asked for.
Operators can strap one vendor’s SMO onto another vendor’s RAN. This confirms the forecast that I have recently released, with details on steady growth for RIC and rApp license revenue. (See chart below.)
Grumblers are still going to grumble. This is Ericsson winning in an open market for software….even though many people were hoping that it would be smaller vendors. Have patience. More than 23 different companies have applications on the Ericsson rApp directory. So, while Ericsson will control the operating system here, many other players have their chance to provide a best-in-class solution for each narrow problem.
What about xApps and dApps?
What about xApps and dApps? As they say in New York, "Fuhgeddaboudit." Real-time optimization will happen in the RAN software, and coordination with a third-party vendor creates too many problems. The juice is definitely worth the squeeze, because there is plenty of optimization in the microsecond-level near-realtime domain.
But the RAN vendors are in a much better position to optimize real-time settings, and their cooperation is absolutely necessary for success. That opportunity is simply not going to open up.
Now we can see what the open RAN market will look like. A few good vendors will survive and provide radio hardware, with the top-tier vendors taking the lion’s share of volume due to their ASIC cost advantages. And many software vendors will engage in optimizations, with top-tier vendors dominating the operating system.
Maybe this wasn’t the open RAN that you asked for….but it’s the open RAN that you got. Stop grumbling.
Joe Madden is principal analyst at Mobile Experts, a network of market and technology experts that analyze wireless markets. He does not have any commercial relationships with Vodafone or Ericsson, the two companies mentioned most prominently in this opinion piece.
Opinions from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.