Is Ericsson's Open RAN stance that open?

 

An extract from the Open RAN RIC and Apps report and workshop.

Ericsson is one of the most successful Telecom Equipment Manufacturers of all time, having navigated market concentration phases, the emergence of powerful rivals from China and elsewhere, and the pitfalls of the successive generations and their windows of opportunity for new competitors to emerge.

With a commanding estimated global market share of 26.9% (39% excluding China) in RAN, the company is the uncontested leader in the space. While the geopolitical situation and the ban of Chinese vendors in many western markets has been a boon for the company’s growth, Open RAN has become the largest potential threat to their RAN business.

At first skeptical (if not outright hostile) to the new architecture, the company has been keeping an eye on its development and traction over the last years and has formulated a cautious strategy to participate and influence its development.

In 2023, Ericsson seems to have accepted that Open RAN is likely to stay and represents both a threat and opportunity for its telecom business. The threat is of course on the RAN infrastructure business, and while the company has been moving to cloud ran, virtualizing and containerizing its software, the company still in majority ships vertical, fully integrated base stations.

When it comes to Open RAN, the company seems to get closer to embracing the concept, with conditions.

Ericsson has been advocating that the current low layer split 7.2.x is not suitable for massive MIMO and high capacity 5G systems and is proposing an alternative fronthaul interface to the O-RAN alliance. Cynics might say this is a delaying tactic, as other vendors have deployed massive MIMO on 7.2.x in the field, but as market leader, Ericsson has some strong datasets to bring to the conversation and contest the suitability of the current implementation. Ericsson is now publicly endorsing Open RAN architecture and, having virtualized its RAN software, will offer a complete solution, with O-RU, vDU,.vCU, SMO and Non-RT RIC . The fronthaul interface will rely on the recently proposed fronthaul and the midhaul will remain the F1 3GPP interface.

On the opportunity front, while most Ericsson systems usually ship with an Element Management System (EMS), which can be integrated into a Management and Orchestration (MANO) or Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) framework, the company has not entirely dominated this market segment and Open RAN, in the form of SMO and Non-RT RIC represent an opportunity to grow in the strategic intelligence and orchestration sector.

Ericsson is using the market leader playbook to its advantage. First rejecting Open RAN as immature, not performing and not secure, then admitting that it can provide some benefits in specific conditions, and now embracing it with very definite caveats.

The front haul interface proposal by the company seems self-serving, as no other vendor has really raised the same concerns in terms of performance and indeed commercial implementations have been observed with performance profiles comparable to traditional vendors.

The Non-RT RIC and rApp market positioning is astute and allows Ericsson simultaneously to claim support for Open RAN and to attack the SMO market space with a convincing offer. The implementation is solid and reflects Ericsson’s high industrialization and quality practice. It will doubtless offer a mature implementation of SMO / Non-RT RIC and rApps and provide a useful set of capabilities for operators who want to continue using Ericsson RAN with a higher instrumentation level. The slow progress for 3^rd party integration both from a RIC and Apps perspective is worrisome and could be either the product of the company quality and administrative processes or a strategy to keep the solution fairly closed and Ericsson-centric, barring a few token 3^rd party integrations.