FYUZ 2023 review and opinions on latest Open RAN announcements

 

Last week marked the second edition of FYUZ, the Telecom Infra Project's annual celebration of open and disaggregated networks. TIP's activity, throughout the year, provides a space for innovation and collaboration in telecoms network access, transport and core main domains. The working groups create deployment blueprints as well as implementation guidelines and documentation. The organization also federates a number of open labs, facilitating interoperability, conformance and performance testing.

I was not there are for the show's first edition, last year, but found a lot of valuable insight in this year's. I understand from casual discussion with participants that this year was a little smaller than last, probably due to the fact that the previous edition saw Meta presenting its Metaverse ready networks strategy, which attracted a lot of people outside the traditional telco realm. AT about 1200 attendees, the show felt busy without being overwhelming and the mix of main stage conference content in the morning  and breakout presentations in the afternoon left ample time for sampling the top notch food and browsing the booth. What I found very different in that show also, was how approachable and relaxed attendees were, which allowed for productive and yet casual discussions.

Even before FYUZ, the previous incarnation of the show, the TIP forum was a landmark show for vendors and operators announcing their progress on open and disaggregated networks, particularly around open RAN.

The news that came out of the show this year marked an interesting progress in the technology's implementation, and a possible transition from the trough of disillusion to a pragmatic implementation.

The first day saw big announcements from Santiago Tenorio, TIP's chairman and head of Open RAN at Vodafone. The operator announced that Open RAN's evaluation and pilots were progressing well and that it would, in its next global RFQ for RAN refresh, affecting over 125,000 cell sites see Open RAN gain at least 30% of the planned deployment. The RFQ is due to be released this year for selection in early 2024, as their contracts with existing vendors are due to expire in April 2025.

That same day, Ericsson’s head of networks, Fredrik Jejdling, confirmed the company's support of Open RAN announced earlier this year. You might have read my perspective on Ericsson's stance on Open RAN, the presentation did not change my opinion, but it is a good progress for the industry that the RAN market leader is now officially supporting the technology, albeit with some caveats.

Nokia, on their side announced a 5G Open RAN pilot with Vodafone in Italy, and another pilot successfully completed in Romania, on a cluster of Open RAN sites shared by Orange and Vodafone (MOCN).

While TIP is a traditional conduit for the big 5 European operators to enact their Open RAN strategy, this year saw an event dominated by Vodafone, with a somewhat subdued presence from Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Orange and TIM. Rakuten Symphony was notable by its absence, as well as Samsung.

The subsequent days saw less prominent announcements, but good representation and panel participation from Open RAN supporters and vendors. Particularly, Mavenir and Juniper networks were fairly vocal about late Open RAN joiners who do not really seem to embrace multivendor competition and open API / interfaces approach.

I was fortunate to be on a few panels, notably on the main stage to discuss RAN intelligence progress, particularly around the RICs and Apps emergence as orchestration and automation engines for the RAN.

I also presented the findings of my report on the topic, presentation below and moderated a panel on overcoming automation challenges in telecom networks with CI/CD/CT.