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.