The United States has a new 5G strategy, hoping to make a comeback with Open RAN

The Financial Times reported that the Pentagon is urging US telecom equipment manufacturers to work together to develop 5G technology. The head of research and development at the US Department of Defense has asked US companies to develop open source 5G software, warning that if they do not do so, they risk being eliminated.

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What is open source 5G software? In order to get rid of the backward situation of 5G, the United States has come up with a new trick?

Actually, it is Open RAN

The Financial Times pointed out that this technology is Open RAN, or open radio access network, which is to achieve modular construction of base stations through open source software, open interfaces and white-box hardware.

Specifically, the base stations purchased by operators today are integrated with software and hardware, all from the same equipment manufacturer. In the Open RAN model, software and hardware are separated, and dedicated hardware is replaced by general hardware. Operators' base stations will be supplied by multiple manufacturers. For example, manufacturer A provides RAN software, manufacturer B provides general servers, and the chips in the servers are provided by another general chip giant C.

Open RAN may overturn the rules of the game in the traditional base station equipment market, and new suppliers will emerge, posing a threat to traditional equipment giants such as Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, and Nokia.

This is undoubtedly the situation that the United States would most like to see. After all, the United States no longer has any 5G wireless equipment manufacturers, and its 5G base station equipment all comes from Ericsson and Nokia in Europe and Samsung in South Korea.

Once Open RAN reaches a certain scale, RAN software suppliers will include startups from the United States, and general chips will be provided by Intel. This will not only have the potential to reshuffle the 5G wireless equipment market, but the entire ecosystem will currently be beneficial to the United States.

What are some emerging U.S. suppliers?

You can refer to TIP's OpenRAN plan. The TIP alliance initiated by Facebook in 2016 has a plan called OpenRAN. Since its establishment, three emerging OpenRAN suppliers have emerged, namely Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless, all of which are American companies.

In December 2018, Rakuten Mobile, a new Japanese operator, announced that it would build a virtualized RAN through white-box hardware, open software, and open interfaces. Its RAN software supplier is Altostar. In August 2019, Dish, which is expected to become the fourth largest mobile operator in the United States, also said that it would consider using the RAN software provided by Altiostar. In October 2019, Vodafone launched a large-scale OpenRAN trial, and its suppliers are Mavenir and Parallel Wireless.

Simply put, the new 5G strategy proposed by the US Department of Defense is probably to strengthen new US suppliers such as Altiostar, Mavenir and Parallel Wireless through Open RAN, so as to get rid of their predicament of having no wireless equipment manufacturers in the 5G era.

but,

It’s not easy for Open RAN to succeed

Although some operators are currently experimenting with Open RAN, their test scenarios are all in remote rural areas where equipment stability and performance requirements are not high, and there is no 5G Open RAN equipment yet.

This is mainly because Open RAN faces the following challenges:

Performance Challenges

Open RAN uses general-purpose chips, but the performance of general-purpose chips is far lower than that of dedicated chips, which makes it difficult to meet the high-performance requirements of 5G networks. In the end, acceleration must be achieved by introducing dedicated hardware.

Energy Consumption Challenge

General-purpose hardware consumes more power than specialized hardware, and as 5G data traffic increases exponentially, its power consumption will be even higher.

Integration Challenges

In the Open RAN mode, base station hardware and software come from different manufacturers, and RU and DU also come from different manufacturers, which requires complex interoperability testing and verification among multiple manufacturers.

Maintenance Challenges

A small base station is made up of multiple suppliers, so who is responsible for the failure? In the future, 5G base stations will not only serve people, but also machines in factories and cars on the road. These scenarios have more stringent service level requirements. Once a failure occurs, which manufacturer should the operator find to deal with it in time?

It seems that the United States still has a long way to go with this new 5G strategy.