AT&T says it will shift 70% of its network traffic onto open and interoperable platforms by 2026 as part of its RAN modernization plan
Last year, AT&T announced a roughly $14 billion plan to shift 70% of its network traffic onto open and interoperable platforms by 2026. At the heart of this plan is a single radio access network (RAN) software level provided by Swedish vendor Ericsson. According to AT&T’s Vice President of Network and Wireless Access Construction & Engineering Todd Zeiler, this shift is laying the foundation for the telco’s larger RAN modernization program.
“A device is way more than just a smartphone, so today, my device peer has to … interop at least two different software vendors that I get for RAN layer, so when he wakes up in the morning, his job is 2x complex,” Zeiler told RCR Wireless News, adding that when AT&T is done with its modernization program, it will be possible to take a “swath of devices” and bring it to a single RAN interface software layer to interoperate across the entire network.
“You can imagine the efficiencies. Then, you trace that through the device, all the way through the RAN, through transport, through core, to the content, you can appreciate that that is one less level of complexity to get that end-to-end slice,” he said.
And it’s here, he continued, riding on top of that virtualized and simplified network, that AT&T will inject new AI functionalities.
But before it can do that, said Zeiler, AT&T will first open up the radios and the basebands so that it can mix and match the hardware overtime. “Step one is a special purpose baseband unit that is open that we purchased from Ericsson, but closely behind that you will begin to take that Ericsson RAN software and put it on cloud,” he explained. This cloud piece is from Dell — you can read more about the pair’s cloud tie-ups here.
At the top of the cell site, Zeiler continued, AT&T might have an Ericsson radio or a third-party radio — which it can do because it’s an open ecosystem — but at the bottom, the telco will initially have an open Ericsson baseband. “Ultimately, I will displace that [baseband] with a Dell server that is now agnostic to whatever software I put on it in the future,” he added, explaining that at this point, AT&T can bring additional compute to the Dell server.
Now, we come back to AI: “You can begin to layer AI there and if you split that baseband unit in half, you have a virtualized DU, you have a centralized CU. Now you’re in a data center-like environment where you choose to co-locate the AI/ML compute and the GPUs,” he explained, calling this RAN modernization strategy a “crawl, walk, run” approach. “We have to get there,” Zeiler said. “We have to start looking at how to run the network more efficiently, whether it’s optimization of resources [or] predicting faults.”
The final — and most important — piece, according to Zeiler, is the SMO, or service management orchestration, which supports open software interfaces to facilitate rApp communications. rApps are specialized microservices that maximize the radio network’s operational efficiency.
By enabling the SMO layer to be a single pane of glass, AT&T can see every vendor and customer that’s interacting with its network, allowing it to drive further efficiencies. “Then, I open up an app store [rApps] that allows for me to create efficiencies in the network by developing apps that save me money,” he said. “That’s the big picture goal.”
While 6G has been broadly characterized as AI-native, AT&T isn’t really tying its RAN journey to any specific generation of tech. “We use marketing language — 5G, 5G-Advanced, 6G — but it’s really important this time around that we don’t just launch new spectrum and have a new indicator on the phone and put a big marketing machine behind it,” argued Zeiler. “We believe 5G must continue to evolve whether that’s called ‘next G’ or 6G. While we’re not 100% sure where it’s going to come from, what we’re doing now, we believe, will allow us the flexibility [to monetize].”
