The U.S., U.K. and Europe have all seen complexities and challenges arise from the initial lack of supply chain diversification in 5G network hardware. Most controversially the early dominance of Huawei led to U.K. and U.S. government concerns that the China-based firm posed a national security threat — an allegation that Huawei denied. However, new Huawei 5G equipment was duly banned from UK networks at the end of 2020, and all existing hardware must be removed entirely by 2027. The US and Europe have taken similar steps, essentially blocking Huawei from future network contracts across the board.
These steps have played a large contributing role in the subsequent popularity of Open RAN solutions (especially in the US), and down to a technical level in solving the challenge of developing Massive MIMO (mMIMO) radios that are O-RAN compliant.
Private 5G increases the pressure
Demand for 5G network components has never been higher, driven by the rising popularity of ‘private’ 5G networks, operated by enterprise and designed to provide specific connectivity requirements, such as in a semi-automated warehouse or Industry 4.0 deployment. Indeed, a recent report predicts that the global private 5G network market is projected to reach USD $13.92 Billion By 2028, growing at a CAGR of 40.9% from 2020 to 2028. The study by Polaris Market Research noted that “Market players are taking aggressive steps in the form of partnership agreements for ensuring proper deployment of private 5G networks for industry-specific applications. Several leading market players are strategically collaborating with key manufacturers to develop a test center to test different industrial automated devices for functioning with a private 5G network.”
Tight focus on few manufacturers
As a result, it is not just national infrastructure telcos that are competing for hardware, and the wider general disruption caused by the global pandemic is inevitably adding pressure to supply chains in every sector, but in particular technology. The major 5G network infrastructure suppliers are Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung, creating a very tight focus on just a handful of companies for much of Europe and North America’s 5G network hardware.
In order to tackle the lack of diversity the UK Government has put up £30 million to attract “innovative R&D projects” that could help to speed up the adoption of a new breed of wireless Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN or O-RAN) based 4G and 5G mobile networks. The Future RAN Competition (FRANC) will fund innovative R&D projects across the UK to speed up adoption of Open RAN, which allows equipment from multiple suppliers to be used in 5G networks and will end the current dependence on one company’s technology.
Meanwhile in Europe, major operators are also seeking to boost O-RAN development, one concrete example being the March 2022 MoU agreement update between Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone. The latest Release 2 aims to define a fully automated and interoperable multi-vendor Open RAN system, according to the partners, which will evolve into a set of minimum requirements for O-RAN solutions.
Benefits of Open RAN
Although the O-RAN ecosystem is very much in the initial stages, the concept offers plenty of potential promise. The aim is to standardise the infrastructure, masts and antennae arrays so that manufacturer interoperability is much more likely. This general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology approach should deliver benefits for all players, opening the market to a wider range of hardware suppliers and manufacturers, increasing competition and broadening the options for enterprise and operators alike. In particular, O-RAN standardisation should allow network upgrades in the future to be far less complex, good news for early movers.
O-RAN and mMIMO challenges
A central challenge is to develop Massive MIMO (mMIMO) radios that are fully compliant with the emerging O-RAN interfaces and architectures. There is substantial development being channelled into this endeavor currently, including names such as Samsung and Xilinx making recent announcements. On the operator side, Vodafone recently announced that it would be working with Dell, NEC and Samsung on a commercial deployment of 5G OpenRAN technology.
Although there is clearly growing momentum behind exponents of O-RAN, there are many challenges ahead, most significantly to grow the ecosystem that will support the market, as well as reach agreement on the details of the emerging standard. There are clear areas of agreement, such as the importance of uplink improvement, but here the devil really is in the details. Moving from the current customized and highly optimized in-house silicon to general-purpose chips is a contentious question, with some existing manufacturers claiming that general purpose processors will be unable to handle the real time processing required for beamforming — at least without a significant cost, power consumption and heat penalty.
Geopolitics and global networks
There is certainly a growing technical community forming around O-RAN, but it is clear there is much work still to be done on all sides of the value equation. A November 2021 report published by Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, TIM and Vodafone called for EU-wide consensus and urgent prioritization of O-RAN technologies to avoid falling behind in the global race. According to the report, Europe had 13 major O-RAN players at the end of 2021, compared to 57 across the rest of the world, but many of the European players are still in the early stages of the development lifecycle.
From a wider industry perspective, there are concerns that broadening the 5G vendor market will increase the number of potential security loopholes in network hardware, an inevitable consequence of diversification. Similarly, the O-RAN working group has been beset by the challenges of setting global technical standards while managing the evolving national security concerns of the US. One recent example is the semiconductor company New H3C, a member of the O-RAN Alliance, but as of November 2021 on the U.S. export controls list. It seems that diversification may well prove far more complex — and prone to fragmentation — than anyone may have first thought, as the stakeholder list broadens and deepens each month. The O-RAN story still has many pages to be written.
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