Popular Trend of Open RAN, Scale Deployment is Imminent
LOTTE CO., LTD. plans to complete the deployment of 7,000 sites by the end of 2021, leading the transformation of Open RAN architecture in the telecommunication industry.
A few days ago, a team composed of some of the largest operators in Europe released a list of priority technical requirements for the Open RAN system, with a view to large-scale deployment of technologies based on this architecture from 2022.
However, why do operators need Open RAN? What are the difficulties in Open RAN deployment and how to improve the efficiency on Open RAN scale deployment?
Telecom industry never stop their steps for the evolution of RAN (Radio Access Network)
Before that, operators’ evolution of RAN aims at how to improve the efficiency of spectrum, the ability of core network, high ability of wireless throughput. While from 4G upgrade to 5G, things are changed. Operators should not only do what have mentioned above, but also learn more from IT and Internet industry to reform the telecommunication industry.
At the same time, with different variety of 5G business, different services need different requirements. In the prospect of providing more choices for operators, Open RAN is an idea solution. Open RAN support operators choose RAN parts flexibly according to their requirements.
Well in IPLOOK opinion, Open RAN can be virtual which is called vRAN. With vRAN, the proprietary radio hardware remains as it is, but the BBU gets replaced by a COTS server rather than being proprietary BBU hardware. The software that runs on the BBU is virtualized to run on any COTS server. But the proprietary interfaces between radios and COTS-based BBU remain as they are. The key with Open RAN is that the interface between the BBU and RRU/RRH is an open interface, so, any vendor’s software can work on any open RRU/RRH. More open interfaces enable the use of one supplier's radios with another processors – which is not possible with vRAN.
vRAN VS Open RAN, explained by IPLOOK
In fact, more and more operators shows an increasingly urgent demand for Open RAN. The trend have been confirmed in recent market research reports. In mid-2020, a Deloitte survey on operators found that most operators believe that the practical deployment of 5G Open RAN baseband unit will spur within two years.
In order to meet the increasing requirement of new business, 5G network need a more flexible solution. With the addition of Open RAN technology, the telecom industry will be able to handle professional tasks, and 5G network deployment will become more efficient. That is also the key reason for why Open RAN is popular now.
However, there are still some technical problems while practical deployment. Overseas operators indicate that although Open RAN is the future, its complexity is difficult to cope with, and what the industry expects is that the deployment can be simple. Open RAN technology requires a company to act as an integrator. The Open RAN concept promises to split the various elements of RAN into LEGO style building blocks that operators can mix and match. Therefore, someone needs to do the integration work of mixing and matching.
Some technicians predict that the launch of RAT & RRU will continue to expand the deployment of Open RAN worldwide, and complete more deployment in different application scenarios. Given that the Open RAN market will grow significantly in the next few years, the maturity of this open technology will be sufficient for large-scale deployment.
The whole telecom industry market is calling for large-scale MIMO solutions, and because of the O-RAN is highly dependent on innovation, its market can also bring us high profit. However, in the current Open RAN field, there is a lack of professional solutions that can consider both efficiency and performance. The so-called high performance should not only achieve 400 MHz instantaneous bandwidth, but also take into account energy efficiency and output power.
Open RAN is an increasingly popular and growing market with high profit. As a leading end-to-end wireless solution provider in telecommunication industry, IPLOOK continues to trailblaze path to wide area converge, ultra-low latency and affordable core network and IMS products which can be deployed on COTS or Cloud. By improving the innovative technology, we can cooperate together to deploy more scalable Open RAN.
