DOCOMO's 30% TCO Open RAN savings

DOCOMO announced last week, during Mobile World Congress Las Vegas the availability of its OREX offering for network operators. OREX, which stands for Open RAN Experience, was initially introduced by the Japanese operator in 2021 as OREC (Open RAN Ecosystem).

The benefits claimed by DOCOMO are quite extraordinary, as they expect to "reduce clients’ total cost of ownership by up to 30% when the costs of initial setup and ongoing maintenance are taken into account. It can also reduce the time required for network design by up to 50%. Additionally, OREX reduces power consumption at base stations by up to 50%".

The latest announcement clarifies DOCOMO's market proposition and differentiation. Since the initial communications of OREX, DOCOMO was presenting to the market a showcase of validated Open RAN blueprint deployments that the operator had carried out in its lab. What was unclear was the role DOCOMO wanted to play. Was the operator just offering best practice and exemplar implementation or were they angling for a different  play? The latest announcement clarifies DOCOMO's ambitions.

On paper, the operator showed an impressive array of vendors, collaborating to provide multi vendor Open RAN deployments, with choices and some possible permutations between each element of the stack. 

At the server layer, OREX provided options from DELL, HP and Fujitsu, all on x86 platforms, with various acceleration ASICS/FPGA... from Intel FlexRAN, Qualcomm, AMD and nvidia. While the COTS servers are readily interchangeable, the accelerator layer binds the open RAN software vendor and is not easily swappable.

At the virtualization O-Cloud layer, DOCOMO has integrated vmware, Red Hat, and WNDRVR which represents the current best of breed in that space.

The base station software CU / DU has seen implementations from Mavenir, NTT Data, and Fujitsu. 

What is missing in this picture and a little misleading is the Open Radio Unit vendors that have participated in these setups, since this where network operators need the most permutability. As of today, most Open RAN multi vendor deployments will see a separate vendor in the O-RU and CU/DU space. This is due to the fact that no single vendor today can satisfy the variety of O-RUs necessary to meet all spectrum / form factors a brownfield operator needs. More details about this in my previous state of Open RAN post here.

In this iteration, DOCOMO has clarified the O-RU vendors it has worked with most recently (Dengyo Technology, DKK Co, Fujitsu, HFR, Mavenir, and Solid). As always the devil is in the detail and unfortunately DOCOMO falls short from providing  a more complete view of the types of O-RU (mMIMO or small cell?) and the combination of O-RU vendor - CU/DU vendor - Accelerator vendor - band, which is ultimately the true measure of how open this proposition would be.

What DOCOMO clarifies most in this latest iteration, is their contribution and the role they expect to play in the market space. 

First, DOCOMO introduces their Open RAN compliant Service Management and Orchestration (SMO). This offering is a combination of NTT DOCOMO developments and third party contributions (details can be found in my report and workshop Open RAN RICs and Apps 2023). The SMO is DOCOMO's secret sauce when it comes to the claimed savings, resulting mainly from automation of design, deployment and maintenance of the Open RAN systems, as well as RU energy optimization.

At last, DOCOMO presents their vast integration experience and is now proposing these systems integration, support and maintenance services. The operator seeks the role of specialized SI and prime contractor for these O-RAN projects.

While DOCOMO's experience is impressive and has led many generations of network innovation, the latest movement to transition from leading operator and industry pioneer to O-RAN SI and vendor is reminiscent of other Japanese companies such as Rakuten with their Symphony offering. Japanese operators and vendors see the contraction of their domestic market as a strategic threat to their core business and they try to replicate their success overseas. While quite successful in greenfield environments, the hypothesis that brownfield operators (particularly tier 1) will buy technology and services from another carrier (even if not geographically competing) still needs to be validated. 

Bridgewater Systems to be acquired by Amdocs for $211M

"Becoming part of Amdocs would enable us to accelerate our corporate growth strategy, centered around global expansion, enabling the transformation to next generation converged networks, portfolio and solution innovation, and leveraging our installed base," said Ed Ogonek, President and CEO, Bridgewater.


As mobile traffic continues to increase and video becomes an increasing part of it, it will be necessary to have a tight intelligent traffic management entity. I see collapse of charging, DPI, PCRF, Routing, Browsing and optimization accelerating. Remember, AMDOCS acquired streamezzo last year to tighten their mobile video story.

In my mind, carriers tolerate today having GGSN, PCEF, proxies, browsing gateways, DPI, web optimization, video optimization engines only because the market is very atomized. The skill set is very dispersed and no vendor today has an intelligent end to end solution to manage traffic from backbone to RAN through core.
As discussed previously, the market is not mature enough for the best of breed approach, full spectrum vendors will step up.

As video traffic increases, it will become evident that having a daisy chain of proxies is inefficient, costly, hardly scalable and complex to manage. I don't see policy management becoming so ubiquitous and intuitive that rules can be instantiated in one point and flow harmoniously to all the elements without impacting the user experience.
The user experience, in video is only as good as the lowest performing element in the delivery chain.

Inevitably, we will see more concentration in that space in the near future.

Worst of breed, golden silo

After some 13-odd years in new technology and product introduction, you can't help but look at trends that pop up in this industry with a cynical eye.

One of the catch phrases I hear often is best-of-breed approach. For me, every time I hear it, it is a sure sign that a market segment or a technology is not mature.

It is somewhat counter-intuitive. Best-of-breed pick-and-choose componentized approach to service delivery hints at ranges of well defined components, fungible, interchangeable. You would think that the interfaces being well defined, each vendor competes on unique differentiators, without impacting negatively the service delivery.

Conversely, silo has become an increasingly bad word in telecoms, evoking poorly architected, proprietary daisy chain of components that cannot integrate gracefully in a modern organic network.

Then why is it that best-of-breed always end up taking longer, being more expensive and less reliable than a fully integrated solution from a single vendor?

In my mind, the standards that have been created to describe the ideal networks, from WAP to MMS, from IMS to LTE have been the product of too many vendor lobby-ism. The results in many case are vaguely defined physical and functional components, with lowest common denominator in term of interface and call flows.
The service definition being somewhat excluded from standards has left little in term of best practice to integrate functional components efficiently.

There is a reason in my mind why the Chinese vendors ZTE and Huawei are doing so well. It is not only because of their cost structure, it is because their all in-house technology approach for business critical components make sense.
It allows fast, replicable deployment and trouble shooting. There is much less complexity in integration and roll out, which is the most consuming part of CAPEX.

Whenever you see these vendors using third party technology, it is because it is either so mature and stable that it is not worth developing in-house or so specialized that it has not been developed yet.
In any case, we are talking about fringe technologies. Anything that is business critical is identified long in advance and developed in-house.
Their product and services might not be as sophisticated or differentiating than specialized vendors, but they deliver value by providing the minimum services at the lowest cost, with good enough reliability.

The companies that will win will either be small niche vendors at the periphery of the larger market opportunities or companies that will be good at providing better value, with stronger benefit, but at a price that  is equivalent.