Readout: Ericsson's Mobility Report June 2024

 

It has been a few years now, since Ericsson has taken to provide a yearly report on their view of the evolution of connectivity. Alike Cisco's annual internet report, it provides interesting data points on telecom technology and services' maturity, but focused on cellular technology, lately embracing fixed-wireless access and non terrestrial networks as well. 

In this year's edition, a few elements caught my attention:

• Devices supporting network slicing are few and far in-between. Only iOS 17 and Android 13 support some capabilities to indicate slicing parameters to their underlying applications. These devices are the higher end latest smartphones, so it is no wonder that 5G Stand Alone is late in delivering on its promises, if end to end slicing is only possible for a small fraction of customers. It is still possible to deploy slicing without device support, but there are limitations, most notably slicing per content / service, while slicing per device or subscriber profile is possible.
  
  
• RedCap (5G reduced Capability) for IoT, wearables, sensors, etc... is making its appearance on the networks, mostly as demo and trials at this stage. The first devices are unlikely to emerge in mass market availability until end of next year.
  
  
• Unsurprisingly, mobile data traffic is still growing, albeit at a lower rate than previously reported with a 25% yearly growth rate or just over 6% quarterly. The growth is mostly due to smartphones and 5G penetration and video consumption, accounting for about 73% of the traffic. This traffic data includes Fixed Wireless Access, although it is not broken down. The rollout of 5G, particularly in mid-band, together with carrier aggregation has allowed mobile network operators to efficiently compete with fixed broadband operators with FWA. FWA's growth, in my mind is the first successful application of 5G as a differentiated connectivity product. As devices and modems supporting slicing appear, more sophisticated connectivity and pricing models can be implemented. FWA price packages differ markedly from mobile data plans. The former are mostly speed based, emulating cable and fibre offering, whereas the latter are usually all you can eat best effort connectivity.
  
  
• Where the traffic growth projections become murky, is with the impact of XR services. Mixed, augmented, virtual reality services haven't really taken off yet, but their possible impact on traffic mix and network load can be immense. XR requires a number of technologies to reach maturity at the same time (bendable / transparent screens, low power, portable, heat efficient batteries, low latency / high compute on device / at the edge, high down/ up link capabilities, deterministic mash latency over an area...) to reach mass market and we are still some ways away from it in my opinion.
  
  
• Differential connectivity for cellular services is a long standing subject of interest of mine. My opinion remains the same: "The promise and business case of 5G was supposed to revolve around new connectivity services. Until now, essentially, whether you have a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, a connected car, an industrial robot and whether you are a working from home or road warrior professional, all connectivity products are really the same. The only variable are the price and coverage.
  
  5G was supposed to offer connectivity products that could be adapted to different device types, verticals and industries, geographies, vehicles, drones,... The 5G business case hinges on enterprises, verticals and government adoption and willingness to pay for enhanced connectivity services. By and large, this hasn't happened yet. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that to enable these, a network overall is necessary.
  
  First, a service-based architecture is necessary, comprising 5G Stand Alone, Telco cloud and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), Service Management and Orchestration are necessary. Then, cloud-native RAN, either cloud RAN or Open RAN (but particularly the RAN Intelligent Controllers - RICs) would be useful. All this "plumbing" to enable end to end slicing, which in turn will create the capabilities to serve distinct and configurable connectivity products.
  
  But that's not all... A second issue is that although it is accepted wisdom that slicing will create connectivity products that enterprises and governments will be ready to pay for, there is little evidence of it today. One of the key differentiators of the "real" 5G and slicing will be deterministic speed and latency. While most actors of the market are ready to recognize that in principle a controllable latency would be valuable, no one really knows the incremental value of going from variable best effort to deterministic 100, 10 or 5 millisecond latency.
  
  The last hurdle, is the realization by network operators that Mercedes, Wallmart, 3M, Airbus... have a better understanding of their connectivity needs than any carrier and that they have skilled people able to design networks and connectivity services in WAN, cloud, private and cellular networks. All they need is access and a platform with APIs. A means to discover, reserve, design connectivity services on the operator's network will be necessary and the successful operators will understand that their network skillset might be useful for consumers and small / medium enterprises, but less so for large verticals, government and companies." Ericsson is keen to promote and sell the "plumbing" to enable this vision to MNOs, but will this be sufficient to fulfill the promise?
  
  
• Network APIs are a possible first step to open up the connectivity to third parties willing to program it. Network APIs is notably absent from the report, maybe due to the fact that the company announced a second impairment charge of 1.1B$ (after a 2.9B$ initial write off) in less than a year on the 6.2B$ acquisition of Vonage.
  
  
• Private networks are another highlighted trend in the report with a convincing example of an implementation with Northstar innovation program, in collaboration with Telia and Astazero. The implementation focuses on automotive applications, from autonomous vehicle, V2X connectivity, remote control... On paper, it delivers everything operators dream about when thinking of differentiated connectivity for verticals and industries. One has to wonder how much it costs and whether it is sustainable if most of the technology is provided by a single vendor.
  
  
• Open RAN and Programmable networks is showcased in AT&T's deal that I have previously reported and commented. There is no doubt that single vendor automation, programmability and open RAN can be implemented at scale. The terms of the deal with AT&T seem to indicate that it is a great cost benefit for them. We will have to measure the benefits as the changes are being rolled out in the coming years.

June 2024 Open RAN requirements from Vodafone, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Tim and Orange

 As is now customary, the "big 5" European operators behind open RAN release their updated requirements to the market, indicating to vendors where they should direct their roadmaps to have the most chances to be selected in these networks.

As per previous iterations, I find it useful to compare and contrast the unanimous and highest priority requirements as indications of market maturity and directions. Here is my read on this year's release:

Scenarios:

As per last year, the big 5 unanimously require support for O-RU and vDU/CU with open front haul interface on site for macro deployments. This indicates that although the desire is to move to a disaggregated implementation, with vDU / CU potentially moving to the edge or the cloud, all the operators are not fully ready for these scenario and prioritize first a deployment like for like of a traditional gnodeB with a disaggregated virtualized version, but all at the cell site. 

Moving to the high priority scenarios requested by a majority of operators, vDU/vCU in a remote site with O-RU on site makes its appearance, together for RAN sharing. Both MORAN and MOCN scenarios are desirable, the former with shared O-RU and dedicated vDU/vCU and the latter with shared O-RU, vDU and optionally vCU. In all cases, RAN sharing management interface is to be implemented to allow host and guest operators to manage their RAN resource independently.

Additional high priority requirements are the support for indoor and outdoor small cells. Indoor sharing O-RU and vDU/vCU in multi operator environments, outdoors with single operator with O-RU and vDU either co-located on site or fully integrated with Higher Layer Split. The last high priority requirement is for 2G /3G support, without indication of architecture.

Security:

The security requirements are sensibly the same as last year, freely adopting 3GPP requirements for Open RAN. The polemic around Open RAN's level of security compared to other cloud virtualized applications or traditional RAN architecture has been put to bed. Most realize that open interfaces inherently open more attack surfaces, but this is not specific to Open RAN, every cloud based architecture has the same drawback. Security by design goes a long way towards alleviating these concerns and proper no trust architecture can in many cases provide a higher security posture than legacy implementations. In this case, extensive use of IPSec, TLS 1.3, certificates at the interfaces and port levels for open front haul and management plane provide the necessary level of security, together with the mTLS interface between the RICs. The O-Cloud layer must support Linux security features, secure storage, encrypted secrets with external storage and management system.

CaaS:

As per last year, the cloud native infrastructure requirements have been refined, including Hardware Accelerator (GPU, eASIC) K8 support, Block and Object Storage for dedicated and hyper converged deployments, etc... Kubernetes infrastructure discovery, deployment, lifecycle management and cluster configuration has been further detailed. Power saving specific requirements have been added, at the Fan, CPU level with SMO driven policy and configuration and idle mode power down capabilities.

CU / DU:

CU DU interface requirements remain the same, basically the support for all open RAN interfaces (F1, HLS, X2, Xn, E1, E2, O1...). The support for both look aside and in-line accelerator architecture is also the highest priority, indicating that operators havent really reached a conclusion for a preferable architecture and are mandating both for flexibility's sake (In other words, inline acceleration hasn't convinced them that it can efficiently (cost and power) replace look aside). Fronthaul ports must support up to 200Gb by 12 x 10/25Gb combinations and mid haul up to 2 x 100Gb. Energy efficiency and consumption is to be reported for all hardware (servers, CPUs, fans, NIC cards...). Power consumption targets for D-RAN of 400Watts at 100% load for 4T4R and 500 watts for 64T64R are indicated. These targets seem optimistic and poorly indicative of current vendors capabilities in that space.

O-RU:

The radio situation is still messy and my statements from last year still mostly stand: "While all operators claim highest urgent priority for a variety of Radio Units with different form factors (2T2R, 2T4R, 4T4R, 8T8R, 32T32R, 64T64R) in a variety of bands (B1, B3, B7, B8, B20, B28B, B32B/B75B, B40, B78...) and with multi band requirements (B28B+B20+B8, B3+B1, B3+B1+B7), there is no unanimity on ANY of these. This leads vendors trying to find which configurations could satisfy enough volume to make the investments profitable in a quandary. There are hidden dependencies that are not spelled out in the requirements and this is where we see the limits of the TIP exercise. Operators cannot really at this stage select 2 or 3 new RU vendors for an open RAN deployment, which means that, in principle, they need vendors to support most, if not all of the bands and configurations they need to deploy in their respective network. Since each network is different, it is extremely difficult for a vendor to define the minimum product line up that is necessary to satisfy most of the demand. As a result, the projections for volume are low, which makes the vendors only focus on the most popular configurations. While everyone needs 4T4R or 32T32R in n78 band, having 5 vendor providing options for these configurations, with none delivering B40 or B32/B75 makes it impossible for operators to select a single vendor and for vendors to aggregate sufficient volume to create a profitable business case for open RAN." This year, there is one configuration of high priority that has unanimous support: 4T4R B3+B1. The other highest priority configurations requested by a majority of operators are 2T4R B28B+B20+B8, 4T4R B7, B3+B1, B32B+B75B, and 32T32R B78 with various power targets from 200 to 240W.

Open Front Haul:

The Front Haul interface requirements only acknowledge the introduction of Up Link enhancements for massive MIMO scenarios as they will be introduced to the 7.2.x specification, with a lower priority. This indicates that while Ericsson's proposed interface and architecture impact is being vetted, it is likely to become an optional implementation, left to the vendor's s choice until / unless credible cost / performance gains can be demonstrated.

Transport:

Optical budgets and scenarios are now introduced.

RAN features:

Final MoU positions are now proposed. Unanimous items introduced in this version revolve mostly around power consumption and efficiency counters, KPIs and mechanisms. other new requirements introduced follow 3GPP rel 16 and 17 on carrier aggregation, slicing and MIMO enhancements.

Hardware acceleration:

a new section introduced to clarify the requirements associated with L1 and L2 use of look aside and inline. The most salient requirement is for multi RAT 4G/5G simultaneous support.

Near RT RIC:

The Near Real Time RIC requirements continue to evolve and be refined. My perspective hasn't changed on the topic. and a detailed analysis can be found here. In short letting third party prescribe policies that will manipulate the DU's scheduler is anathema for most vendors in the space and, beyond the technical difficulties would go against their commercial interests. operators will have to push very hard with much commercial incentive to see xapps from 3rd party vendors being commercially deployed.

E2E use cases:

End-to-end use cases are being introduced to clarify the operators' priorities for deployments. There are many  but offer a good understanding of their priorities. Traffic steering for dynamic traffic load balancing, QoE and QoS based optimization, to optimize resource allocation based on a desired quality outcome... RAN sharing, Slice assurance, V2x, UAV, energy efficiency... this section is a laundry list of desiderata , all mostly high priority, showing here maybe that operators are getting a little unfocused on what real use cases they should focus on as an industry. As a result, it is likely that too many priorities result in no priority at all.

SMO

With over  260 requirements, SMO and non RT RIC is probably a section that is the most mature and shows a true commercial priority for the big 5 operators.

All in all, the document provides a good idea of the level of maturity of Open RAN for the the operators that have been supporting it the longest. The type of requirements, their prioritization provides a useful framework for vendors who know how to read them.

More in depth analysis of Open RAN and the main vendors in this space is available here.