Intel talks the importance of a robust Open RAN/vRAN ecosystem
Intel’s Kartik Srinivasan, senior director of product for Intel Ethernet, views virtualized and Open RAN as “game changer” that will only benefit from ongoing vendor-led work to muck through interoperability and integration requirements. In a conversation with RCR Wireless News, Kartick said the vision of a plug-and-play, multi-vendor radio system is “absolutely” attainable. “But it will be hard because, as I said, this is an ecosystem play, there is a lot of collaboration effort that is needed, a lot of interoperability activities that are needed.”
That said, Srinivasan said Intel and its partners “remain committed” to pushing that vision closer to reality and delivering on customer requirements, specifically around total cost of ownership and technological innovation. “We are confident this is the right direction which we want the market to evolve.”
In terms of what he sees as the primary benefits of seamless Open RAN integration, Srinivasan called out the optionality that comes with component modularity, the availability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to deliver a cost-effective, scalable model, and the “broad innovation spectrum” supported by general purpose computing. He also noted the key role of standardization in supporting the aforementioned benefits.
And, of course, game changing opportunities often come with challenges which Srinivasan put into two buckets. One is “having a vendor ecosystem that is disaggregated, generally speaking, comes with the challenge of having coordination between multiple parties to come up with interoperability, to come up with the integration piece of it, to come up with just general multi-vendor collaboration.” The second bucket simply has to do with the “newness” of Open RAN; customer and system-level requirements must be understood and addressed, knowledge gaps have to be bridged, and changing customer requirements require an evolutionary roadmap for products and services.
Throughout the discussion, Srinivasan returned to the point that the success of vRAN and Open RAN hinges on “an ecosystem play…I cannot stress this enough.”
For a detailed look at what’s happening with Open RAN, register for the virtual Open RAN Global Forum 2023.
