Canned RAN: A Stage Towards Open RAN Maturity

Canned RAN: The First Stage To Open RAN Maturity

A trend is taking shape where open RAN is made of canned solutions – I call this Canned RAN. The concept of interoperable RAN elements is yielding the path for a subset of integrated solutions from a few vendors that plan to dominate the open RAN market (additional perspective here). After a couple of years of initial buildup, the time for open RAN to deliver is here and now. Open RAN vendors sensing the challenge are steering towards greater integration among a subset of partners. Moreover, some players are starting to carve a firm position by embedding of their IP into partners’ solutions. Why is this important? Because the trend gives clues on the level of open RAN maturity, and the challenges that vendors are facing at this stage. I will address some of the consequences to vendors and operators here.

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A New Race is Looming [and it’s not 5G!]: Why China Can Win the Space Internet Future

Space Internet - LEO Constellations

China made headlines by launching an experimental satellite in low earth orbit to test 6G terahertz technology. This has the merit of elevating the 5G race debate to a higher level: 6G and space Internet. It comes at a time when several trends are taking shape, such as the evolution of 6G and the emergence of LEO satellites to provide broadband connectivity.

While some may dismiss this as a test satellite developed in part by universities and research institutes, it would be a mistake to discount China’s influence in the global satellite communication industry. It is correct that China today has a small share of that market, but I believe this could change quickly as China moves to exploit the opportunities that LEO opens up. With all eyes focused on SpaceX and Kuiper, China could easily change the game with its satellite initiatives, with some advancing at a rapid pace. In fact, China lacks nothing to up-end the game for the big players.

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mmWave FWA vs. FTTH: Friend or Foe?

The Real Threat of mmWave FWA to the FTTH Market

5G fanatics would lead you to believe that 5G will make fibre obsolete. So how real are their claims and how does 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) compare to FTTH on performance and RoI? To answer, we teamed-up with our partners at DTS to objectively assess the performance of fibre and millimeter wave (mmWave) FWA. We combined our expertise in fibre and wireless networking together with our cost databases to map the performance and cost models. We published the result of our analysis recently at Cable-Tec Expo / SCTE addressing a suburban deployment scenario. In our paper (download here), we show how FWA performs against fibre on both technical and financial scale against fibre for our illustrative scenario. Our conclusion shows FWA as a good “tactical” play to fill service gaps. However, fibre remains the “strategic” technology where long-term roadmap results in superior performance and RoI.

Comparative performance between fibre, fixed wireless access, and cable technologies mmWave FWA
Comparison of access technologies. [Source: DTS]
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Who Will Lead The Enterprise Private Wireless Network Market?

Enterprise private wireless networks been around ever since commodity base station silicon came to market in the mid-2000’s. 15 years later, deployments remain few and small. So the questions for investors are: are private wireless networks for real? How big a market is it? If I were to put money, where and how should I play this market? While I will not answer these questions here, I wanted to share some of my observations working on private wireless networks and make the case for a new breed of vendors that can take on this market segment.

Enterprise private wireless hype cycle
The 1st enterprise private wireless hype cycle burst following the 2008 financial crisis impact on key sectors such as oil & gas and mining.
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Hindsight is 20/20: Internet Technologies Trends Retrospect

Many significant trends we saw coming in the mid 2010s became reality. Notable examples include the evolution of network function virtualization, the emergence of the telecom cloud platform, the slow but progressive leverage of Artificial Intelligence by telecom operators as a productivity engine, the use of continuous integration and delivery DevOps framework in telecom service deployments, the deployment of network sharing models and the migration of some telecom services to the edge.

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Does Open RAN Stimulate Innovation?

Innovation in Open RAN

Proponents of open RAN argue that opening the RAN interfaces will stimulate innovation. They claim that non-interoperable interfaces allow incumbent vendors to lock out new innovative players and stifle the market. With a small number of incumbent vendors owning much of the market share, the pressure to innovate is low.

Incumbents counter by stressing the optimized performance across the RAN functions; the result of investing billions of dollars and years of field experience. They say that open interfaces between tightly coupled functions reduces performance and increases cost because someone has to integrate functions from different sources.

With this background, I have been looking to answer two questions:

  1. Does open RAN stimulate innovation?
  2. What areas of innovation will open RAN stimulate?
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A Perspective on Open RAN

Open RAN 5G-Core-migration

There are over 800 service providers, but market power favors a handful of radio access network (RAN) vendors who dictate the tempo of technology. With the RAN accounting for around 60% of the network total cost of ownership, open RAN promises to change the balance of power in favor of services providers by reducing vendor power through more competition and choice. To enable this vision, open RAN implements a new set of technologies inspired from the cloud infrastructure ecosystem.

With this background, I wanted to share a few notes from a large canvas of analysis we had conducted at Xona Partners to assess the competitive dynamics and market prospects for open RAN within the overall context of telecom cloud platform deployments. Many critical factors are at play across multiple domains – such as technology, economics, market structure, and even geopolitics. In fact, political factors over the past year only helped to confound market perception of open RAN.

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Clarifying the Confusing RAN Types and Nomenclature

Radio access networks have many descriptors that confuse the non-specialists. This includes open, virtual, cloud, centralized, distributed and cooperative RAN. Confusion is understandable because there are many inter-related aspects. Here, I outline the fundamentals elements that define RAN types and clarify the nomenclature.

The Three Pillars of RAN

Architecture, implementation and deployment are the three elements that define the RAN type.

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Network Sharing: Trends and Opportunities

Network Sharing

Network sharing is one of those topics that makes economic sense, but often falters when it comes to adoption and implementation. Recently, I was asked about the prospects for network sharing given 5G capital investment requirements at a time of economic crisis. This is, of course, related to active sharing models where operators share the radio access network and spectrum. From financial perspective, service providers should be inclined to adopt some form of network sharing to reduce cost and improve their financial performance. Regulators who approve network sharing agreements are eager to encourage 5G adoption and reduce barriers to deployments. But in practice, it’s not that straight forward.

Network sharing has multiple complex dimensions: what is logical may not be practical. We have been in the same situation during the 2008 financial crisis when LTE was about 1 year from commercial deployments. This is roughly analogous to the situation today when we are still in the early phase of 5G deployments. I believe the 2008 financial crisis did help bring about active network sharing in particular, but it was limited to a few markets. Rather, the dynamics in each market plays the dominant role in determining the type and prospects for network sharing. 

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The Case for Network Automation: Application to Power Consumption

Network Automation

Integrated AI-based technology enables networks to adapt autonomously which helps operators optimize their service delivery to consumers and enterprises. As communication networks increase in complexity, operators seek to simplify operation and maintenance activities and reduce operating costs. Network automation could help operators achieve this objective. Automation is not a new concept: it has been around under different names for over 10 years. It is integral to digital transformation that’s reshaping industries by increasing productivity and efficiency. Yet, network automation has seen limited application for different reasons. One of the reasons is that the process of automation was sufficiently disruptive to operators’ processes without a clear value proposition. This may have been the case when networks were simple, but today’s networks are an order of magnitude more complex than their predecessors. For this reason, I had a close look at automation when applied to power consumption which is a major challenge facing operators as they upgrade to 5G.

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COVID-19: ICT Infrastructure Investment Opportunities and Risk to Competition

ICT Infrastructure Investments

Over the past weeks we closely followed the impact of economic lockdowns on the ICT infrastructure to identify weaknesses and areas for future investments. Our analysis is multi-dimensional given the complexity of the ICT infrastructure which combines different types of access and backbone networks. This heterogenous infrastructure varies widely by geography. Our assessment led us to identify areas for future investments and evolve regulatory policies in both developed and developing economies. However, we also uncovered areas that we need to be particularly careful about. One of those areas is balancing competition against investments in infrastructure and the role of regulators. We review a few key observations on traffic trends which drives infrastructure architecture and investments.

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Spectrum Pricing Trends in Millimeter Wave Bands

Written in collaboration with Martyn Roetter*

Millimeter wave spectrum prices

Countries across the world have been releasing new spectrum for 5G deployments in millimeter-wave spectrum bands (mmWave), while others are planning to do so soon.  Although a few governments have awarded mmWave spectrum via administrative processes at little or no cost to operators (Japan, Hong Kong), in most cases the procedure for licensing has involved auctions of 24 GHz, 26 GHz, 28 GHz, 37 GHz, 39 GHz or 47 GHz.  The prices per MHz per PoP of mmWave auctions have been close to the reserve prices set by regulators, with two important exceptions – Thailand and the U.S.

One factor limiting high prices for these high-band auctions is the large multi-GHz amounts of bandwidth they offer.  All of the typical number of up to four mobile operators in a national market can acquire 1 GHz or more of 5G-mmWave spectrum without having to compete among themselves for the same frequencies. In addition to the large blocks of bandwidth on offer, these bands’ short propagation ranges require very closely spaced base stations, or network densification, which also influences operators’ valuations of this spectrum given its higher costs of deployment. These two structural factors explain why the prices paid for mmWave spectrum are much lower than for the 3.5 GHz and other mid and lower bands. 

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