Several CXOs from the telecom industry have discussed their plans and shared their challenges in the emerging Open RAN era — at the Open RAN India 2022 event in New Delhi.

“India is one of the highest data-consuming geographies. The cloud is getting integrated and this very paradigm shift will pave the way for the next innovation of Open RAN primarily, for customers, service providers and networks,” Shyam Mardikar, Group Chief Technology Officer – Mobility, Reliance Jio said.

Shyam Mardikar was speaking at the second edition of the Open RAN India 2022 event in New Delhi.

OPEN RAN market is expected to cross $32 billion by 2030 with a growth rate of 42 percent for a forecast period between 2022 and 2030.

Open RAN is projected to approach 15 percent of total RAN by 2026, says Stefan Pongratz of Dell’Oro Group.

“It’s the time to break down water-tight networks. With the 5G spectrums soon to be auctioned, Open RAN can be very instrumental. We all need to capitalize at this crucial juncture in the history of telecom innovation and move ahead,” Rajat Mukarji, Director General, Broadband India Forum said.

“It’s a long journey where the union of competence, innovation and interoperability will play an important role in making Open RAN highly successful in India,” Saurabh Mittal, Head- Network Infra Products R&D, Bharti Airtel, said.

Mobile operators will have to evolve and transform to meet the increasing demand by evolving from closed and proprietary legacy architecture to open radio access networks that offer interoperability and network flexibility at a lower cost, K Rajaraman, Chairman (DCC) and Secretary (T), Department of Telecom (DoT), Govt. of India, said.

“Disaggregation of hardware and software and cloudification in the RAN part of the network with open interfaces would provide a choice to CSPs to deploy best-in-class solutions from different vendors to reduce TCO, protect their investment and enhance the user experience by using machine learning and advanced analytics-based applications for radio network optimization,” said Narendra Rawat, Vice President-Technology, India & South Asia region, Mavenir.
Wind River understands how to address the service provider’s complex challenges around deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud-native infrastructure.

“Wind River Studio, which is a commercially deployed version of the open-sourceStarlingX project, is a proven solution as it forms the foundation of virtual and Open RAN deployments at Verizon, Vodafone, Elisa, KDDI, NTT Docomo and more on the way,” Paul Miller, Chief Technology Officer, Wind River, said.

“The crucial parts of Open RAN are RU, DU and CU functions. They are the carriers for innovation and at the same time they highlight the picture for Open RAN with all its challenges and competencies,” said Aayush Bhatnagar, Senior Vice President, Reliance Jio.

“We should leverage open interfaces, virtualization and web-scale containerization to support various deployment scenarios – including private, hybrid cloud, and public cloud, which are the key components of Open RAN,” Charles Santhosam, Associate Vice President-RAN System Engineering, Mavenir said.

“Skill deployment is crucial in Open RAN. The O-RAN Alliance is committed to further innovating radio access networks (RAN) built on virtualized network elements, white box hardware, and standardized interfaces with the core principles of openness and intelligence in mind,” said Gil Hellmann, VP-Telco Solutions Engineering & Architecture, Wind River, said.

“Open RAN has captured the telecom industry’s attention with benefits at the global level. But simply disaggregating RAN software from purpose-built hardware is not going to help. There are considerations related to cloud-native RAN workload and lifecycle management. Automation or the SMO part is the key,” Arif Khan, CEO and Founder, Coredge.io, said.

“OpenRAN introduces many advantages to the enterprise telecom market, including infrastructure reconfigurability, flexibility, scalability, frequent and early deployments, higher network sustainability, and Capex / Opex efficiency,” Chitwan Arora, System Design Engineer, Hughes Systique, said.