What was expected to be a game changer, though has yet to make much headway in India, except for a few trials and deployments. Experts cite several challenges for the deployment to pick up, but say it would happen in another two-three years. One of the reasons for the slow adoption is that India has yet to see the deployment of private networks, where companies setting up their own captive communication networks may go for the cheaper technology.
“Open RAN has widely picked up in places where private networks have been implemented. In the Indian context, the telcos are trying a hybrid model. Currently, all of them are brownfield (using networks that have been existing for years),” said Purushothaman KG, partner, KPMG in India. He doesn’t expect an immediate pickup of Open RAN, “because it is going to be in the context of existing networks and existing networks are tied up with traditional OEMs (telecom equipment makers)”.
A report from Counterpoint Research said the Open RAN market will stagnate in 2023 and 2024. Most brownfield network operators remain cautious about additional investments in 5G infrastructure, particularly Open RAN, due to the uncertain macroeconomic climate.
OPEN RAN IN INDIA
India’s largest telecom player, Reliance Jio Infocomm, has built its own end-to-end 5G stack and says its 5G radios are Open RAN-compliant.
Rival Bharti Airtel has conducted Open RAN trials with US-based Mavenir last year, but has not made any announcements on commercial deployments. The company’s journey with Open RAN, in fact, had started almost three-and-a-half years ago.Airtel roped in Mavenir to deploy 4G and 5G sites in low-revenue-generating rural areas, with an initial target of 2,500 sites with plans to increase the number to 10,000. Sanjay Bakaya, Mavenir’s India head, said the company has been working with local operators for deployment of Open vRAN (virtualised RAN) solutions in brownfield networks.The company has already deployed its Open RAN-compliant radio units as well as centralised and distribution units and software along with local operators for serving commercial traffic in India, he said, but added that there were cost challenges. “The Indian market has the lowest ARPU (average revenue per user) in the world, therefore, requires lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) and hence any deployment in India does need to be competitive in terms of capex and opex including energy consumption requirements against the traditional RAN vendors.”
Statistics point out that Open RAN has the potential to reduce deployment costs by up to 30 per cent. RAN alone accounts for up to 70 per cent of a telecom service provider’s capital expenditure. Traditionally, RAN — the basic building block of a telecom network — has proprietary technologies of global players such as Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei and ZTE. Telecom players have to buy an entire block — software and hardware — from one vendor. Through Open RAN, they can mix and match software and hardware components, ultimately bringing in more innovation by diversifying the ecosystem. A senior Airtel executive said the company is still conducting trials on Open RAN.
“At Bharti Airtel, we look at the performance, TCO, interworking or IoDT (interoperability and device testing) while doing Open RAN evaluation … We also engage with many large OEMs, not just O-RAN, but also vRAN,” said Saurabh Mittal, vice -president, standards and industry ecosystem at the telecom operator.
While one of the main advantages of Open RAN is the open stack it is built on, interoperability and security issues have emerged to be the biggest hindrance in its implementation. Also, the industry is still assessing the actual cost savings that will happen after deployment. UK-based Vodafone has been working with suppliers to make Open RAN work.
“Open RAN has been the most talked about topic for the past three or four years. There have been some small deployments here and there, but it has not achieved scale. Now the time has come, we will see Open RAN growing, maybe an extraordinary growth will happen,” said Rajesh Singh, executive V-P (technology-radio planning, network planning and strategy) at Vodafone Idea, the British company’s Indian joint venture.
Neil Shah, vice-president (research) at Counterpoint Research, said: “Open RAN is built upon base 3GPP standards so it should cover most of the security frameworks. But compared to traditional RAN, Open RAN could have some unique security challenges, which mainly arise due to the increased complexity and integration of various equipment from different vendors within the Open RAN architecture, and compatibility issues with the hardware and the software. Rigorous testing and better standardisation among ecosystem players will be key to solving security challenges from COTS (commercially available off-the-shelf) hardware to virtualisation.”
Mavenir said in DISH networks in the US, it has deployed more than 10,000 sites with 60,000 RUs coming from another vendor. Deployment at scale is already achieved and operationalised by employing sophisticated automation framework which significantly reduces the cost of maintenance and upgrade of the sites at scale never seen before, Bakaya said.
Prafulla Kumar, V-P & product head at Jio, said with 5G and in future, Open RAN has challenges and some of the answers. “Innovations, inclusivity, and also openness (are some of the answers). I won’t count costs at this point of time. We have seen in the previous generation of networks that introducing new features takes a lot of time. This is going to change in the 6G era, or starting with 5G itself.”
WAY AHEAD
Global firms including Mavenir, Fujitsu and Rakuten are Open RAN vendors that are aggressively working towards open and disaggregated networks.
Vodafone globally has announced plans to work towards Open RAN. In 2020 Rakuten Mobile launched the world’s first commercial largescale Open RAN network as a greenfield operator. However, the cost savings would quite differ from greenfield versus brownfield operators.
As per a report by industry body GSMA, 18 operators have commercially deployed Open RAN, while more than 80 operators have exhibited interest or announced plans to deploy it.
Rakuten Mobile has worked with multiple vendors to launch its commercial 4G and 5G services on Open RAN in Japan. The company has been in discussions with Indian telecom operators for securing Open RAN deals, but no announcement has been made so far. Industry executives say the technology will see wider adoption eventually in India.
Mavenir’s Bakaya said: “With maturity of technology and a wider ecosystem, Open RAN solutions are competitive and are ready for the mass roll out in high volume, even in cost-sensitive, markets like India. Open RAN is already a success in many of the markets around the world both in greenfield and in brownfield deployments. In India, Open RAN rollouts have picked up steam in 2023 and we expect ramp up to large volumes in 2024.”
The Indian industry has highlighted interoperability, performance and cost of Open RAN equipment among major challenges for implementation, though they are expecting the deployments to pick up gradually.
A Counterpoint report said following a period of rapid network build-outs, greenfield operators are looking to lower capex in 2023 and 2024 and focus on network monetisation. And investments in Open RAN will start to increase after 2025 with network operators investing a cumulative over $30 billion between 2022 and 2030.
“Navigating in the Open RAN ecosystem is itself a challenge. But I think things will happen. The industry is more or less maturing towards that path, and we are really looking forward to it,” Airtel’s Mittal said.
Open RAN deployments may commence in India in the next 12-18 months, starting with private networks which will allow the ecosystem players to assess the feasibility of Open RAN for large-scale rollouts, said experts. Kristian Toivo, executive director of Telecom Infra Project, said: “In many parts of the world, maybe also in India, we will see initial deployments in private networks because you are able to realise the benefits at a smaller scale without necessarily needing that large scale supporting environment for operational transformation.”
Commenting on the competition thrown in by Open RAN technology, Magnus Ewerbring, chief technology officer at telecom equipment maker Ericsson Asia Pacific, said: “We like competition. It makes us tougher, we have to be good … we will take up competition from Open RAN and other areas as well.”
He said the company backs open interfaces and has been supporting and driving standardisation groups. “We are collaboratively working in Open RAN now and we have given a definition of an updated interface. We hope to have that soon in the market and help the industry to drive up,” Ewerbring said.
Open RAN will get picked up in India when it comes to network slicing, where you need to at least slice the network and use the network for specific use cases. The industry is having discussions on the implementation bit, especially in industry use cases, which is not yet well established. So, it will take some time for Open RAN to grow healthily, KPMG’s Purushothaman said.
