Stay focused to enjoy Open opportunities

The industry needs to be wary of the efforts to shift the focus and redefine Open RAN, and instead pay attention to its basic principles

- JOHN BAKER

There has been much debate and misinformation surrounding the concept of Open RAN, with incumbent mobile equipment providers and some media outlets providing negative self opinionated comments. However, it is important to understand the two main principles of Open RAN. Firstly, Open RAN focuses on open interfaces and interoperability of network elements. Secondly, there is no requirement in any of the specifications on how to build the elements with open interfaces.

The Open RAN community has been very clear about encouraging innovation that allows suppliers to compete globally. It’s also, worth noting that it takes a global community to build a global ecosystem and marketplace; as a result, the two are interdependent.

There has been a lot of discussion on vendor-locked silicon and the type of acceleration that is good or bad, which is crazy, to say the least. One can have a vendor-locked system from an incumbent that uses custom silicon technology with unknown acceleration techniques. This, according to the incumbents, is good for the industry, including from a security perspective being a single point of supply chain failure.

Compare that to a multi-vendor Open RAN solution that may use some common silicon or code that provides diversity in the supply chain – I know what I would recommend.