Dell Technologies sees a bright long-term outlook for Open RAN
LAS VEGAS–With its Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL) and constantly-expanding suite of telco-optimized products, Dell Technologies is a major player in Open RAN. While there seems to be broad support amongst operators for disaggregating radio access networks, scaled deployment, particularly in brownfield network environments, has been slow to materialize. Dell Technologies Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell acknowledged this week that, “Open RAN isn’t a snap of the fingers and it’s a success. It’s going to take some time. But we are seeing almost every carrier, at some level, embrace virtualization and sort of containerization of different parts of their network.”
Speaking with media and analysts at Dell Tech World at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Dell came across as both realistic and optimistic, calling Open RAN a big opportunity. He, along with colleagues from the Telecom Systems Business, also discussed Dell’s telco efforts in the context of marrying its existing organization, portfolio and relationships around on-prem enterprise IT–the edge–with operators’ efforts to both transition to cloud-based networks and monetize 5G by offering enterprise-facing services.
“As you come to understand the things we’re doing around the edge,” Dell said, “I think those are intimately intertwined with the development of public and private 5G networks. We have a rather substantial business in telco. What has been happening is all the telecom carriers, the networks, are in the process of modernizing and virtualizing and containerizing…and that’s moving infrastructure into a more industry-standard-like architecture with some very specific requirements for telco.” Big picture, he said, there are around 7 million base stations in the world that are becoming small data centers that require new infrastructure—”all our work on the edge ties to 5G.”
Dell Technologies co-COO Jeff Clarke, speaking alongside Dell, said the modernization and disaggregation of networks is well underway and accelerating although potentially taking longer than may have been expected. Despite that, “We’re very excited about it and continue to invest significantly in it,” Clarke said.
In an expansive interview with RCR Wireless News last week at the Big 5G Event in Austin, Dell’s Dennis Hoffman, senior vice president and general manager of the Telecom Systems Business, focused on the price/performance characteristics of Open RAN as compared to single-vendor systems. To the core question of whether Open RAN software on top of an abstraction layer running on an x86 server is as performant and lower cost than an integrated system, Hoffman said, “Likely no at the moment, but…that will tip at some point.”
