A Brief History of Oran

With the rise of LTE, a few vendors became dominant. Primarily Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei captured most of the radio units market. The three of them commanded 74% of the market share in 2014

The Evolution

In the early 2000s, when Nokia, Samsung, NEC, and LG together introduced the OBSAI (Open Base Station Architecture Initiative) interface between Radio and Baseband, Jukka Klemettilä, Chairperson of the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) said: “Open Base Station Architecture will revolutionize radio base station development. It will allow next-generation radio base stations to be built using best-of-breed, shared platforms and modules, available on an open market, whilst letting network suppliers differentiate on system and network-element levels.”

However, there were other suppliers who did not want OBSAI to proliferate. Some of them formed their own alliance to create an alternate interface called CPRI (Common Protocol for Radio Interface) to further divide the market. The result was that both OBSAI and CPRI remained proprietary because even though several components of these interfaces were standardized and open, the Operation and Management (O&M) protocols continued to be proprietary.

This is also the story that comes to mind when thinking of Open RAN. Mobile Network Operators (MNO) have forever been pursuing this but never managed to get right. Till now, that is.

Even during the definition of the WCDMA standards, the Radio Access Network was split into the “Node B”, the physical layer of the base station, and the Radio Network Controller (RNC). A group of Node Bs was controlled by an RNC, and the interface between them, known as the Iub interface, was targeted to be standardized so that MNOs could mix and match RNCs and Node Bs. Again, as it wasn’t in the vendors’ interests to do this, there was no momentum to implement such an open interface.

Then with LTE, all RAN functions moved to the base station, now called the eNodeB. Radio to Core interoperability has existed since the GSM days and this architecture allowed small cell vendors to use the S1 interface to get into the Radio business.

However, the X2 interface which allows eNodeBs to communicate with each other was still proprietary and prevented true multi-vendor RAN in LTE.

In 2010, ETSI (European Telecom Standards Interface body) and NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) announced the creation of a new Industry Specification Group (ISG). Its aim was to develop the Open Radio equipment Interface (ISG ORI), enabling interoperability between elements of base stations in cellular mobile network equipment. Despite its well-defined open standards and good intentions, the level of adoption in the industry remained limited.

With the rise of LTE, a few vendors became dominant. Primarily Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei captured most of the radio units market. The three of them commanded 74% of the market share in 2014. This was difficult for the Operators who again tried to create an alliance to “open” up the RAN and foster competition in a market where vendor choice was limited.

ORAN

The O-RAN Alliance was founded in February 2018

by five Operators – AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO, and Orange – to integrate the existing xRAN Forum and the C-RAN Alliance. The xRAN forum mainly consisted of American enterprises but also included among its members Japanese,

Korean and European companies. The C-RAN Alliance consisted mainly of Chinese enterprises. Both organizations were involved in developing interoperable open interfaces, intelligent control using big data and virtualized RAN.

By unifying the two organizations, it was expected to streamline activities and make faster progress.

• O-RAN Alliance develops specifications, largely for the following 3 aspects:
• The open interface between base station equipment (e.g., Fronthaul, X2)
• The open interface within BS equipment for HW/SW decoupling (i.e., Virtualization)
• An open interface for onboarding open RAN Intelligent Controllers (i.e., Intelligence)

At the same time, TIP OpenRAN was formed by the Telecom Infra Project led by Facebook (now Meta), with an original goal similar to O-RAN.

However, since the establishment of O-RAN, its objectives have shifted to building RAN solutions based on general-purpose vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology. (Source: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/open-ran-and-o-ran-brief)

Their recent focus has been on the adoption of open compute hardware. Some vendors thought of O-RAN as just another attempt by the industry to create competition. The hype would fade away soon. Others like Ericsson and Huawei initially stayed away from the activities of the group. But there is a difference this time.

There are two major global disruptions in the ORAN story. The first is the adoption of Telco Cloud. The telco cloud is a software-defined, highly resilient cloud infrastructure that allows telcos to add services more quickly, respond faster to changes in demand, and centrally manage their resources more efficiently. So what was essentially an Enterprise solution, suddenly became accessible to Telecom applications, allowing the disaggregation of the Hardware from the Software.

This enabled the possibility to use Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Hardware, at least in theory. The second was the vision of one man, who after having closely contributed to the 4G network launch at Reliance Jio, was attracted to Japan to see if he could topple the vendor establishment in a far more advanced market.

This man is Tareq Amin, who as chief technology officer of Rakuten Mobile, proposed to use tools that originated in the IT industry to construct a state-of-the-art mobile network, from scratch. The key achievement of Tareq Amin was to get several vendors on board to build a true multi-vendor network. However, one aspect truly stood out. They got Nokia to open up its CPRI interface to work with Rakuten.

Amin said this was a big concession for Nokia, which he appreciated because in the past, vendors kept their CPRI interfaces proprietary so that operators would not have the choice of mixing and matching hardware and software. It is another thing that Rakuten did not select Nokia for the 5G rollout (choosing NEC instead). But without Nokia’s collaboration in 4G rollouts, it would have been hard for Rakuten to pull off something that was carrier-grade.

Tareq Amin is no stranger to innovation. Before joining Rakuten Mobile in 2018, Amin as Senior Vice President of Technology Development and Automation, Reliance Jio, was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the Technology Development and Automation organization, including innovation, development, and operations. His organization led software development, systems engineering, next-generation access networks, technical operations, and R&D. Amin drove end-to-end network design and deployment to meet coverage, capacity, and performance needs of India’s largest greenfield LTE TDD network, supporting industry-leading data connectivity and innovative services such as VoLTE/HD Voice and eMBMS. It is no wonder that when he got the opportunity to create something as disruptive as what Rakuten had planned, he readily took the plunge.

Should anyone be worried then? The statement by Stephen Elop 2011, the then CEO of Nokia, stated that the Company is standing on a “burning platform” shows that waiting too long to react can lead to irreversible damage.

We are yet to see an impactful disruption in the telecom network space as was seen in the Smartphone space with Android and iOS – where Nokia and its dominant Symbian slowly faded away.

With 5G deployments in advanced stages in several parts of the world, real impacts of wide-scale Open RAN can start to be seen when virtualization becomes mainstream and new vendor ecosystems mature. For India, where 5G networks are yet to be launched, OpenRAN provides a huge opportunity to create in-house capabilities for new Radio Access products that are made in India, for the world.

By V&D Bureau

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