Five main reasons ORAN adoption is accelerating

There’s no doubt that 5G is bringing a seismic shift to Africa’s mobile networks. Two major questions on everyone’s lips, though, are when and how.

Many operators are grappling with when. Do you get in early and attempt to beat competitors to market? The caveats are that there may be some expensive lessons you’ll teach competitors at no cost to them. But, you could get deep into a transformation journey before getting a rude surprise. That's expensive and time-consuming.

On the flipside, you may miss the market opportunity.

It’s a tough choice to make. But service providers have a lot more options today to roll out 5G. Exploring these can shed light on when the best time may be.

On the one hand, you could roll out 5G as traditional RAN networks and continue working with vendors that have previously supplied proprietary technology.

But the Open RAN (ORAN) initiative has gained serious ground in the past year. It has gained support from a slew of international vendors. It’s also benefitted from the Rakuten deployment.

Speed was a traditional shortcoming, but virtual networks are now faster than before with ever-more proven deployments.

ORAN’s benefits stack too high and the evidence cannot be ignored. And they’re beginning to overshadow the proprietary alternatives by some margin.

There are five major factors that contribute to this trend.

Moore's Law continues to benefit network virtualisation. According to the law, processor speeds will double roughly every 18 months. The upshot is that there are no longer packet routing chokepoints in the virtual fabric.

Speed was a traditional shortcoming, but virtual networks are now faster than before with ever-more proven deployments.

We can now also have dedicated workloads in virtual environments. The result is that virtual networks now perform as well as physical networks. Yet they still offer the scale, agility and flexibility advantages of virtual networks.

Radio access kit is one of the biggest expenses in wireless networks. But analysts and Rakuten's experiences suggest businesses can save 40% capex and 30% opex over proprietary deployments. Those savings can immediately benefit large network incumbents or agile new market entrants to deliver top tier services and performance.

There are more benefits. ORAN enables new services and models that weren’t possible before. ORAN reduces investments compared with what was seen in the traditional 2G and 3G networks. That lowers new investment requirements.

It enables cascading deployment of progressively more advanced services towards the network periphery. That creates revenue-generating opportunities, improves customer experiences and expands coverage.

The ORAN Alliance has enabled vendors to use a common split option and standard interface specification platform. It makes integration easier and less complex. It has enabled multi-vendor support on commercial networks as far back as 2020. Projects called “plugfests” have additionally demonstrated interoperability among various vendors.

From our partner NEC’s blog: “NEC contributed to the success of what is believed to be the world’s first carrier aggregation using 5G frequency bands in a multivendor Open RAN compliant radio access network in September 2020.”

It demonstrated how carriers can expand their vendor ecosystem to deploy best of breed RAN architectures. It also demonstrated phased network extensions and phased 5G integration.

Vendors are creating new, high-performance, low-energy chips specifically for centralised and distributed ORAN radio equipment. Less power and smaller size reduce capex and opex. This is particularly important in Africa's characteristic wide areas. Much of Africa's mobile network energy is either hybrid or off grid, which can be expensive.

Policy and commercial initiatives also support accelerated ORAN.

The Open RAN Policy Coalition strives to achieve many goals and sustain several principles. Among them, it seeks to remove 5G deployment barriers, fund research and development, support vendor diversity through government procurement, and avoid heavy-handed or prescriptive solutions.

Several ORAN trials around the world demonstrate how 4G and 5G ORAN overcome scale and performance issues. In Africa, we are working with customers to deal with applying ORAN to specific local challenges. Primary goals include enabling network migration, evolution, penetration, coverage and new services that help them gradually progress toward 5G. Crucially, we help monetise the journey.

This starkly contrasts the traditional capex hit of proprietary solutions. Ultimately, you will have the ability to use equipment from multiple vendors in a single geographic region without suffering from the usual performance overheads.

That means you can gradually introduce 5G elements into the densest and most populous geographies in networks. As you do so, the existing, older generation equipment can be shifted further out.

This approach radically reduces the investment necessary to expand the network. It implies you can improve services and customer experiences progressively, across the board. It's one of the most sensible innovations to come to the networks in the recent past and you can see why it's so popular.