Assessment of Open Ran: Difference between revisions

Most telecommunications executives interviewed by Senza Fili believe that Open Ran is the greatest disruptions in the industry. Patrick Lopez, Global VP of Product Management for 5G at NEC said, “If we look at how fast Open RAN has emerged and reached a level of maturity that allows deployments at scale, we may conclude that it is one of the fastest-moving technologies in the telecom market ever.”  <ref name=":4">https://senzafili.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/SenzaFili_DD_ORAN_Ecosystem.pdf<!-- Page 48 --> p. 10</ref> His views were echoed by others who believe that Open Ran would help them solve vendor-lock ins and other issues that were common in the traditional RAN. However, they also noted that Open Ran comes with its own challenges, which need the cooperation of the whole industry to overcome them. The greatest challenge being integration. Santiago Tenorio, Head of Network Strategy & Architecture at Vodafone once said in a webinar<ref name=":6">https://www.parallelwireless.com/wp-content/uploads/Parallel-Wireless-e-Book-Everything-You-Need-to-Know-about-Open-RAN.pdf<!-- Page 48 --><nowiki/>p.10</ref>, “We haven’t even scratched the surface of system integration challenges.” The good news is that integration is easier in greenfield deployments when compared to brownfield deployments. That is why most deployments have been in rural areas where the operators have to start from scratch. Deloitte estimates that as of December 2020, there were 35 Open Ran deployments in the world<ref name=":2" />. It comprises radio units (RUs), antenna and baseband units (BBUs) in the case of a 4G network. The BBU consists of centralized units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs). The RUs are responsible for sending and receiving data, whereas the BBUs process that data. In a traditional RAN architecture, the interface between the BBU and the RU is closed while all other interfaces are open. The Open RAN architecture aims to solve this, as shown by the  figures on the right.