A “Status of Open RAN” webinar this week saw Nokia, Viavi and Mavenir vying for attention on Open RAN. Did they succeed? Nokia Nokia broadly took the position that OpenRAN was, frankly, nothing that they weren’t already doing (years before Open RAN became a “thing”). To be fair, they are perhaps the most progressive of the large RAN vendors. Announcements from mid-2020 show that they are at least open-RAN-ifying their offerings, in a package called Single RAN. Open RAN is explicitly referenced in their announcement regarding BT. Work in progress However they also itemized out the open RAN interfaces which, though identified, are not fully specified. As such, “there’s no such thing as an end-to-end O-RAN compliant RAN”. That may be true, though it hasn’t prevented Rakuten putting into live operation, at scale, a RAN based on open principles. Nokia called out as a reality check the number of feature requests they receive across the open RAN equivalents of Radio Unit, Centralised Unit and Distributed Unit. With parity of performance and features a non-negotiable aspect of customers procuring new kit, assuring it across such a huge matrix of variations is going to be a challenge for the industry. Impact goes […]