AT&T continues to make progress toward integrating new vendors into its grandiose open radio access network (RAN) plans, which analysts note will be key to operators gleaning more efficiencies from their wildly expensive 5G network deployments.
AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches told an audience at this week’s Bank of America C-Suite TMT Conference that the carrier is seeing progress toward attracting more potential open RAN equipment vendors.
“The goal would be over time to have new entrants into the market for providing radio access network equipment,” Desroches said of those efforts. “And we’re already seeing early signs of new providers coming forward and saying they’d like to be part of this, of the overall solution set for us over time. We believe this move will not only reduce our costs over time, it will also encourage others to, it will also lower the cost for the overall industry.”
That progress was highlighted by Ericsson’s recent move to tighten its long-standing open RAN work with Dell Technologies. That work will see Ericsson and Dell focus on developing network cloud transformation plans to operators tailored to their particular needs, including support and guidance on how to construct cloud-native architectures to support the specific telecom-needs of cloud and open RAN deployments.
“This is something we felt we were going to have to do anyway, something we thought we needed to do for the industry,” Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM for Dell Technologies’ Telecom Systems Business, told SDxCentral regarding how the tightened partnership fits into the AT&T move. “The beauty of it is that it’s very much customer lead and we’re not doing any of this on a whiteboard. We’re able to take what we’re doing together with AT&T and the idea was how do we formalize that and scale it and bring it to other operators around the world and see if we can’t help accelerate their transformation.”
AT&T recently started deploying Ericsson’s Cloud RAN technology on its commercial 5G network at a location south of Dallas. This involved migrating one of AT&T’s C-band frequencies to the Cloud RAN infrastructure, which is now supporting commercial traffic.
AT&T and Ericsson also completed a test call across the commercial Cloud RAN infrastructure and stated “third-party vendors will be able to use this configuration for open RAN in the future.” AT&T has provided a goal of having 70% of its wireless network traffic flowing through its open RAN platform by the end of 2026.
AT&T open RAN needs and opportunities
Analysts have noted that this tightened integration is becoming increasingly important for operators looking to deploy open RAN.
“Open RAN has the promise of interoperability with the interfaces being standardized and then you give each of the application providers and hardware providers the ability to connect to the interfaces in a standardized way,” Recon Analytics Founder Roger Entner noted in a recent podcast. “In theory this should work really well. In reality, it doesn’t work very well.”
Entner pointed to initial deployment struggles experience by greenfield 5G network operator Dish Network, which hobbled its initial open RAN deployment. Entner added that those efforts only began to stabilize once Dish Network brought on established open RAN vendor Samsung, “which took over a lot of that stack.”
That initial trouble has been linked to AT&T’s controversial decision to rely heavily on Ericsson as the base of its open RAN efforts.
“It’s no surprise that, for example, AT&T when they are going to open RAN they gave everything to Ericsson to make sure everything works with a single-stack vendor and there’s not finger pointing, and only then will they open it up to other radio vendors and potentially other parts of the stack as well,” Entner added.
Opening that stack can also drive new revenue opportunities.
Analysys Mason noted in a recent report that operators wanting to bolster their mid-band spectrum support powering 5G services should focus those bolstering efforts on open RAN-based cell site equipment. The firm explained that the underlying virtualized RAN (vRAN) architecture will allow for centralized control over the multitude of these open RAN-based smaller cells.
“The virtualization of the RAN allows for improved management, observability and agility within the small-cells network, enhancing QoE and efficiency,” Stephen Burton, research analyst at Analysys Mason, wrote. “vRAN also supports flexible deployment of network functions, in the central cloud or on-premises.”
Analysys Mason also linked the use of open RAN in these instances to easing the ability for operators to partner with neutral-host deployments that can offer network-as-a-service (NaaS) support.
“By adopting either open RAN, or by leveraging neutral host deployments, operators can improve the business case for small cell coverage,” Burton added. “However, the two concepts are even more effective when combined. Open RAN can maximize flexibility in neutral host deployments, allowing for greater interoperability between different tenant operators’ active networks (which may be supplied by different vendors) and the neutral host infrastructure.”
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