Picocom President: “We need a healthy ecosystem of semiconductor vendors in the Open RAN world selling chips that are freely available to anyone that wants to buy them.”
The RAN Intelligent Controller is seen as a key way that Open RAN can provide operators with all manner of network optimization capabilities that drive efficiency while also serving as a platform that can enable innovation, differentiation and, potentially, new service revenues. But before the industry reaches a point where this is possible at scale in the real world, the foundation has to be well-built. This is where semiconductor firm Picocom is focused.
The very nature of the RIC in an Open RAN network lends itself to being responsive to changing conditions in near real time. Because of this, there’s a growing realization among operators that the best place to experiment with this technology is in real world conditions. “This is a very powerful way to go,” Picocom President Peter Claydon told RCR Wireless News. “We do see people now saying, ‘I’ve tried the RIC, it just doesn’t work at all.’ The expectation here of how quickly this is going to go is possibly unrealistic. You’ve got to get the plumbing to start with. That’s the sort of thing that companies like Picocom are concerned with.”
One way to hasten this ability to see impactful results while supporting the clear desire for innovation rests in creating commonality, in creating scale; this problem (or opportunity) has led operators to work more collaboratively with their vendors to go through the necessary process of achieving common interfaces and common management systems to operate disaggregated radio systems. “That’s kind of the boring part,” Claydon said. “Instead of having to do this every time you do an integration with a different operator…if there’s just one thing, it’s going to help a lot. It’s going to leave people free to innovate rather than doing boring stuff.”
Reflecting on the opportunity for disruption of the semiconductor industry in parallel with the disruption opportunity presented by Open RAN, Claydon likened it to how a small number of semiconductor firms support a large number of Ethernet or Wi-Fi equipment companies. “This is something which we’re just seeing starting to come to fruition in Open RAN where we’re getting that vertical cooperation between organizations,” he said. Claydon also noted that operators are now taking a much closer look at semiconductor architecture–Vodafone’s establishment of a dedicated facility in Spain, for instance. “I think this is very healthy,” he said. “Open interfaces, I think, are a friend of the semiconductor company.”
Picocom partners with Radisys on 5G open platforms
Back to this point around commonality, Picocom sees this maturing as it relates to RAN interfaces–open fronthaul and eCPRI, both of which are incorporated into the company’s chips. Claydon also noted support for the Small Cell Forum’s Functional Application Platform Interface (FAPI) that standardizes how the physical layer works with higher-layer software stacks. Picocom is working with Radisys to deliver to customers joint 5G Open RAN platforms using the former’s small cell SoC and the latter’s Connect RAN 5G software. “The cooperation up and down that ecosystem…has been encouraging,” he said. “Next year, once you’ve got that fundamental base of things that actually works, that’s what allows you to build innovation on top of that.”
To that potential for innovation, “Operators, they’re obviously getting excited about this possibility,” Claydon said, listing off opportunities around neutral host networks in buildings and on campuses, as well as delivering private networks or end-to-end network slices in support of myriad enterprise digital transformation initiatives.
Slicing, he said, hit something of a mindshare peak more than a year ago which has since been tamped down a bit in industry discussion. But, with the maturation of the RIC, there looks like a path to RAN slicing in a fashion that could deliver guaranteed network parameters. “It does seem the RIC is something that can enable that sort of thing. There’s a huge scope for innovation in that area.”
