Verizon is seeing progress toward greater open radio access network (RAN) maturity but wants to see further interoperability progress in specific areas before it drives open RAN further into its commercial operations.
The open radio access network (ORAN) ecosystem received a significant jolt late last year when AT&T announced plans to spend around $14 billion over the next five years to deploy ORAN equipment with the goal of having 70% of its wireless network traffic flowing through its ORAN platform by the end of 2026. The move is significant as it involves a lot of numbers and is from an established brownfield operator.
Adam Koeppe, SVP of network planning at Verizon, told SDxCentral that “it’s actually entertaining seeing so many of our competitors talk about O-RAN,” but that Verizon remains focused on solidifying the open tenets of the ORAN ecosystem. Koeppe specifically cited ongoing interoperability challenges between functions in an ORAN environment.
“Today, the baseband function and the radio function, they actually use an interface called CPRI, which is common public radio interface, and it's not really common at all,” Koeppe said. “Each supplier, and it’s typically the same supplier for the baseband and the radio, they put their secret sauce into that interface to ensure that both sides of the equation work well. Well, that's not open. We want to ensure that O-RAN actually has an open interface between the two sides of the equation, the baseband and the radio.”
Brownfield operators have so far leveraged interoperability challenges by focusing their ORAN deployments around a select number of vendors running on simplified platforms. AT&T, for instance, has so far only announced Ericsson as its main ORAN platform supplier and Fujitsu as a provider of radio equipment.
Koeppe noted that Verizon does have “a large proliferation of O-RAN capable equipment already in our network, so that’s good,” but work remains.
“What we know works is a single supplier O-RAN, meaning it's one supplier for the baseband and the radio following the O-RAN spec. We know that works, and that's good. We’ve seen a lot of progress there,” Koeppe said. “What we need to prove can be highly effective and reliable is a multivendor O-RAN deployment, meaning I've got a different supplier for the baseband and different supplier for the radio using that open O-RAN interface to work in a high-traffic environment, high-quality environment.”
While a lot of this work is progressing through the ORAN Alliance, governments are also being asked to help. The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently held a public meeting where telecom industry representatives touched on setting up a government-funded certification process that would provide standards to which ORAN components would need to comply.
“This would be a real opportunity for having a set of configurations that gets certified end-to-end and are made easy to deploy at a cost-effective way,” Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Executive Director Kristian Toivo said during the proceedings.
The U.S. government has worked toward supporting ORAN testing initiatives.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recently completed a 5G Challenge event that provided $7 million in “prize money” for vendors showing multivendor interoperability across ORAN components. That event was focused on interoperability across radio units (RUs) and combined central units (CUs) and distributed units (DUs).
Koeppe said these events have been important for the industry’s ORAN push.
“You’re seeing a lot of activity with the U.S. government around creating test beds,” Koeppe said. “We’re part of that process and we think it’s actually very beneficial for development of open RAN at scale.”
A recent report from ABI Research predicts the ORAN market will grow to between 6% and 8% of the total RAN market by the end of this year.
Verizon 5G SA core work tied to device penetrationKoeppe also added a device wrinkle to Verizon’s paced 5G standalone (SA) core plans. He explained that while the carrier has a 5G SA core supporting commercial traffic, testing and device interoperability with that core remains a work in progress.
Koeppe said that in moving toward a 5G SA core “you're eliminating 4G-anything from the equation. So not only do you need the 5G core functions for SA functioning on your 5G core, you also have to ensure that your radio access network software accommodates SA capabilities. And then you have to ensure your chipset and device portfolio is SA capable as well, and that's been a relatively slower ramp.”
Koeppe cited the lengthening device-upgrade cycle that has led many operators to extend their device payment contract lengths to three years. However, device makers have been integrating 5G SA support in their latest models, which has allowed some operators to move more aggressively on their 5G SA deployments.
Verizon executives have noted ongoing 5G SA tests to ensure performance parity with the carrier’s legacy systems, but said that Verizon remains in no rush to roll out 5G SA more broadly until it’s satisfied with that performance.
“We're starting to see a healthy penetration of SA-capable devices that are in the market,” Koeppe said. “We have the luxury of time, if you will, to ensure that we focused on the right things with our 5G core deployment. And we're at a point where we're going to put the SA capabilities through their proper paces because we have to ensure that the customer experience is parity or better than what they have today. … And as the device penetration catches up, we want to time our advancement of SA capabilities on the core and radio access network with penetration.”
Verizon is not alone on 5G SA timing. Dell’Oro Group reported that only a dozen 5G SA networks were commercially launched worldwide in 2023, which was below the 18 launched in 2022.
“On a positive note, we believe a lot of work has been done in the background, preparing for 5G SA launches by mobile network operators and we expect 2024 to have more launches than 2022,” Dell’Oro Group Research Director Dave Bolan stated.