When the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) asked for public comment on the $1.5 billion “Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund,” they were explicit about its goals. The 10-year Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) grant program aims to “drive U.S. wireless innovation, foster competition and strengthen supply chain resilience,” and “unlock opportunities for U.S. companies, particularly small and medium enterprises, to compete in a market historically dominated by a few foreign suppliers…”
Left unspoken: Despite significant industry investment, Open RAN has yet to deliver the outcomes its advocates were hoping to achieve.
By opening up closed, proprietary radio technologies, Open RAN was supposed to spark a revolution in the wireless equipment marketplace. Instead of a supply chain dominated by three traditional telecom vendors — none domestically based — a vibrant new ecosystem would emerge, with U.S. businesses leading the charge. So far though, most Open RAN projects seem stuck in proof-of-concept.
Efforts like the NTIA’s could help break this logjam. But to overcome barriers to Open RAN adoption, we need to understand what those barriers actually are. The issue isn’t immature standards or device certifications. The real problem boils down to dollars and cents. Currently, the biggest RAN equipment customers are mobile network operators (MNOs), so early Open RAN projects have focused almost exclusively on telecom use cases. But while macro networks will play a big role in the Open RAN story, they’re not the only story.
Thanks to new innovations like Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a growing private wireless market has emerged for enterprise and industry — areas that could also benefit greatly from Open RAN. Given the diversity of private wireless use cases and the rate they’re being adopted, this market is potentially riper for disruption than telecom. If we want to truly reimagine RAN supply chains, let’s make sure U.S. spectrum policy and investment addresses all wireless use cases, not just a subset.
Rethinking spectrum
It’s hard to overstate the role spectrum policy plays in influencing wireless equipment ecosystems. Indeed, today’s limited supply chain stems directly from the exclusive-license model that’s dominated spectrum allocation for decades. When only a few large MNOs can realistically secure licenses, you end up with just a few large suppliers catering to their needs. Disaggregating equipment and opening interfaces is a great start. But as long as the wireless supply chain revolves around the same telecom use cases, it will be very difficult for new vendors to break through.
By expanding spectrum policy to address new types of users with different requirements, we create space for new vendors and innovations. After all, the diversity of private wireless use cases means they cannot be served by one-size-fits-all telecom solutions. The needs of a manufacturing plant network are different from those of a hospital, which are different from those of a school system, which are different from those of a public utility.
So far, few vendors are approaching Open RAN from a private wireless perspective, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. As we’ve seen with CBRS, opening spectrum to new users and licensing models is among the fastest ways to spur multivendor innovation. In just three years since CBRS went live, a brand-new ecosystem — much of it U.S. based — has already emerged, including 40+ equipment vendors, 187 commercial CBRS base station models, nearly 500 authorized clients and more than 4,000 certified professional installers. Broadening spectrum access to promote further growth in private wireless, in addition to macro networks, could yield similar results for Open RAN.
Delivering solutions
Just as important as spectrum access, there’s another missing piece impeding Open RAN for private wireless: commercially-ready enterprise solutions. Private wireless implementations are highly use case-dependent. That’s what makes them so attractive —the ability to combine 5G/LTE security and performance with connectivity tailored to specific applications. Open RAN would offer even more flexibility to tune wireless networks for robotic automation, connected healthcare, autonomous vehicles and a thousand other applications. Currently though, most Open RAN initiatives don’t prioritize enterprise use cases. Today’s Open RAN solutions are:
- Too telecom-focused: We can’t meet enterprise needs by trying to adapt components designed for telecom networks. Even if those components are technically “open,” they’re built to address the concerns, complexities and budgets of MNOs — not the affordability or usability that enterprise users require.
- Too complex: Imagine a manufacturer that wants to build a private wireless network to meet current and next-generation needs. In theory, Open RAN should allow them to choose best-of-breed equipment and run third-party RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) applications to optimize their specific use case. But try to find a solution that stitches those pieces together to deliver the end-to-end reliability and security a manufacturer requires, and it doesn’t exist.
- Not commercially ready: Along those lines, most Open RAN projects happening outside the telecom space, such as at research institutes, are largely academic. They also typically rely on open-source RIC and Service Management & Orchestration (SMO) frameworks that require extensive customization. None offer anything close to a viable enterprise product.
Unless we start prioritizing development of enterprise Open RAN solutions that are fully baked, secured and operationally ready, this huge potential market will remain untapped.
Seeding an ecosystem
Open RAN may not yet be where we’d hoped, but the industry has accomplished much to be proud of. The broad vision of open constructs, architectural components and interfaces is all in place. Significant standardization and certification work is happening. And some new vendors have entered this space, bringing new strengths and ideas. For Open RAN to truly take off, however, we need to expand our focus — both from vendors and policymakers — beyond narrow telecom use cases.
Without a path to market for companies that don’t currently supply MNOs, additional industry-led investment is highly unlikely. Adoption will be dominated by the same MNOs and their suppliers, potentially improving equipment pricing but solving none of the broader supply chain limitations that Open RAN was designed to fix. If regulators were concerned about these issues for 5G, they will become even more limiting in the future, as U.S. businesses will require 6G wireless services for their IoT and industrial connectivity needs to keep pace with the extreme QoS and scale requirements for their digital transformation use cases.
Another significant aspect central to modern technology adoption today is the enablement of a developer community around it. Open RAN offers this with the programmability of its open interfaces that can be leveraged by applications targeted to optimize networks to specific use cases. Enabling Open RAN to serve a vast array of private network based enterprise use cases opens the doors for a large developer community to rally around Open RAN adoption, untethered by MNO timelines or priorities. Such a goal is well suited for the next generation U.S. workforce that is getting trained in colleges today in software, cloud, edge, machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies.
Fortunately, NTIA has a clear model for moving forward. As we’ve seen with CBRS, by expanding spectrum access, we can rapidly grow new supplier ecosystems. By spreading investment across more types of use cases and customers, we can make the most of the Open RAN opportunity.
