Integration challenges still cloud open RAN

There’s no doubt that the open radio access network (RAN) movement has taken the wireless industry by storm. Interest is at an all-time high, but is there a risk the whole thing will blow up due to industry sniping? After all, some players would like to see the big incumbent vendors get out of the way, making room for the new and, presumably, improved set of players. After some fits and starts – some more than others – big vendors like Ericsson and Nokia say they’re on board with the open RAN movement. Whether they’re truly “open” or not is up to interpretation, but they’re not going away quietly into the night. Broadly speaking, some headwinds are bound to come up as with any new technology. Operators have been building telecom networks for years, and some inertia can be expected when new technologies come along. But if there’s not one vendor controlling the end-to-end deployment, then who’s going to take that on? Dish Network is one example of a company building a greenfield 5G network based on open RAN. Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen said that Dish wound up acting as a system integrator. It wasn’t a role they thought they were going to take on, but with all the vendors, someone had to step up and be the “glue” that holds them together, he said.