SiliconANGLE article by Jason Bloomberg
Not since the commercialization of the internet in 1994 have we seen a maelstrom of disruptive innovation like the one pounding on our shores today. And yet, in contrast to the mid-1990s rise of the internet that led to the singular dot-com boom, today’s disruption comes in diverse forms.
The rise of cloud-native computing promises extraordinary dynamism and scalability of hybrid enterprise infrastructure. The “internet of things” seeks to connect anything and everything to, well, everything else. 5G promises not only blisteringly fast mobile connectivity, but an extraordinary improvement in latency and performance for the IoT and the rest of the edge computing landscape.
This whirlwind of disruption, however, represents an extraordinary effort in convergence. The previously divergent worlds of enterprise information technology and telecommunications operations are now colliding with explosive force.
At the eye of this storm: the open, standards-based architecture OpenRAN.
What is OpenRAN and why is it so important?
RAN stands for radio access network – the software and hardware that enable mobile telephony operators to provide wireless connectivity services to the public.
Throughout the various generations of RAN – 2G, 3G and today’s 4G LTE – RAN technologies have been largely proprietary. “In a traditional RAN, hardware components and software code are tightly coupled, and interfaces do not support interoperability between different vendors,” explains the website of Mavenir, one of the leaders in the OpenRAN market. “That means nearly all the equipment comes from only one, closed supplier.”
To address this problem, the broader telecom industry has been looking for a way to avoid problematic vendor lock-in as it moves to 5G. “For decades, operators have been ‘locked in’ to legacy RAN vendors, like Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, because these suppliers not only provide the hardware but also the software that controls it,” says Danielle Royston, public cloud evangelist at TelcoDR. “This is why the industry has gotten so excited by the promise of OpenRAN, an initiative to create multi-vendor, software-based RANs, run on general-purpose hardware.”
Three vendors in particular are looking to disrupt this lock-in status quo. “Mavenir, Altiostar and Parallel Wireless are very focused on bringing OpenRAN technology to market with no overhead,” says John Baker, senior vice president of business development at Mavenir. “This can be done with far less people at far lower costs to disrupt the marketplace.”
OpenRAN offers two essential value propositions: an open architecture that allows customers to mix and match components from different vendors, and a virtualization layer that separates OpenRAN software from now general-purpose hardware that supports it.
