Summary Bullets:
• Ericsson’s joint announcement with AT&T this week of plans for high-scale open RAN deployment represents an important milestone for the open RAN movement and could help stimulate the ecosystem.
• But it’s not clear exactly how widely and quickly AT&T plans to put in place true open RAN in the most meaningful sense – multi-vendor base stations that invigorate supplier competition and software innovation.
Source: Ericsson, AT&T
Ericsson’s joint announcement with AT&T this week of plans for high-scale open RAN deployment represents an important milestone for the open RAN movement, which AT&T helped launch to begin with, but which has not yet seen dramatic acceleration in operator networks. AT&T’s moves in that area could help alter the movement’s trajectory.
The open RAN ecosystem has been expanding for years in anticipation of market demand growth. But operator deployments have been relatively limited thus far, beyond NTT DoCoMo and Rakuten Mobile in Japan and Dish Networks in the US (the latter two being greenfield networks, an exception in the market). Even some of open RAN’s biggest cheerleaders have only committed to relatively modest rollouts (for example, Vodafone’s 2,500-site plan in the UK). The AT&T/Ericsson announcement is the kind of big endorsement members of the open RAN community hope for to give the market more confidence in the concept – a 12-figure deal for a large-scale investment with a proposed footprint covering most of a tier-one operator network.
Still, there are enough unknowns surrounding AT&T’s plans to raise questions about exactly how different this move is from the conservative approach to open RAN that most operators have taken to date. Soft language in the release itself gives AT&T some wiggle room. The plan is for deployment of “open-capable platforms.” The open RAN sites will be “operating in coordination with Ericsson and Fujitsu.” And in a separate release, Ericsson says it will build a network platform for AT&T and transform it into an open, cloud-native one “through time.”
The uncertainty isn’t just semantic. It’s not clear exactly how widely and quickly AT&T plans to put in place true open RAN in the most meaningful sense. Technically, deploying open RAN can mean simply ensuring that the fronthaul connections at each cell site (the fiber connection between the baseband, or computing, unit and the radio) follow the industry-standardized protocol specified by the Open RAN Alliance. It doesn’t necessarily mean pairing basebands and radios from different vendors, nor does it necessarily mean using a virtualized baseband (on a general-purpose server), which is the model envisioned in the open RAN concept. In fact, Ericsson has said that one million of the radios it has already deployed for operators are currently “hardware-ready” for open RAN support. So, AT&T’s stated goal of having 70% of its network traffic being handled by “open-capable platforms” is open to much interpretation.
AT&T does seem to suggest it plans to deploy multi-vendor base stations, noting that open RAN support “will enable rapid scaling and management of mixed supplier hardware at each cell site.” And virtual RAN does seem to be included in its plans, based on its calling out, as suppliers in this effort, server giant Dell and chip maker Intel – both of which have big vRAN pushes in full swing. AT&T also seems to be considering a stepwise approach: hardware support for open RAN first, followed by migration to virtual RAN and the addition of third-party radios. We just don’t know much about the scale and pace at which AT&T plans to deploy the kind of multi-vendor virtualized base stations that represent the full realization of the open RAN concept.
In any case, from a high-level view, this news signals a consequential milestone: a tier-one, major-market operator moving toward large-scale investment in open RAN in a brownfield network. That will likely encourage investment more broadly, which will bolster the open RAN ecosystem and give other operators more confidence in embracing open RAN themselves in a virtuous cycle. Still, as ever with open RAN, the pace at which this happens is hard to foretell.