Tag Archives: C-RAN

A Look at Open Ran

AT&T recently announced a $14 billion dollar deal with Ericsson to start upgrading its cellular networks to Open RAN (ORAN). I suspect most of the readers of this blog know a lot more about fiber technology than cellular technology. They’ve probably been seeing headlines for years talking about various flavors of RAN technology and probably wondered what it means. The bottom line is that the AT&T announcement is a big deal and means a big shift in the cellular vendor industry.

RAN stands for Radio Access Network, which is an acronym for the radios and antennas at a cell site. Open RAN represents a migration to a software-driven network where any brand of radio can be used at a cell site. This is a big deal in an industry where three major companies – Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia – have made the gear for cellular networks. This means that most cellular networks rely entirely on the proprietary gear of a single vendor. A shift to Open Ran is akin to the migration a few years ago when data centers migrated to lower-cost white box routers and switches instead of having to buy proprietary gear from large vendors like Cisco.

However, the migration of the cellular network to generic hardware is a lot more complicated than making switches operate in a data center. This is mostly due to the complicated nature of operating a cell site in an environment where factors like temperature, precipitation, and customer traffic volume change the overall performance and operating characteristics of a cell site during the day. I always think of the old saying that operating a fiber network is science while operating a wireless network is art. The only solution for dealing with the complexities found at cell sites has been to pick an integrated suite of products from one vendor.

AT&T is the largest cellular carrier to announce it is moving towards ORAN. A few years ago, the newly formed DISH cellular effort announced it would use ORAN, but the technology was not ready, which drastically hindered the company’s initial launch of the network. The UK announced in 2021 that it has a goal to migrate its cellular networks to 35% Open RAN by 2030. The AT&T announcement doesn’t mean the company will be able to freely integrate any brand of radios into its networks but is a big first step towards true Open RAN.

The original view of Open RAN was that a cellular company could put any radio anywhere, connect it to the backhaul, and it would work. The software in the cloud would automatically handle the integration with the overall network and the surrounding cell sites, and the new site would work out of the box.

We’re still a long way from that ideal and may never fully get there. Cellular carriers have relied on the major vendors because they made sure that a cell site would work. I think back to all of the other launches of wireless technology where vendors released beta equipment and the first generation of customers were, unfortunately, the guinea pigs. I painfully recall watching ISPs try to launch wireless broadband networks using LMDS and MMDS spectrum and failing when the radios didn’t operate as promised.

Part of the reason that the migration to Open Ran has been slow is that vendors and carriers have also been pursuing other network options to cut costs. Historically, all of the electronics were fully integrated at a cell site. The RAN radio units were installed on a tower, and the BaseBand unit (BBU) with all of the brains was installed in a hut at the base of each tower. Technicians had to go through the time-consuming process of fine-tuning the electronics at each tower to meet the specific local circumstances.

In recent years, there have been efforts to consolidate some of the BaseBand Unit functions.

  • DRAN (Distributed RAN) was the first attempt to separate the base electronics from the radios. That was a lot harder than it might seem because a cellular tower relies on precise timing and fiddling with the type or length of wiring between the radios and the base caused all sort of problems.
  • CRAN (concentrated RAN) moved the base units into regional data centers (BBU hotels) and opened up the concept of DAS – Distributed Antenna Systems that would work from these centralized sites.
  • C-RAN (Cloud RAN), not to be confused with CRAN, has been a movement to move the entire brains of a cell site into data centers.

Open RAN takes something from each of these various evolutions and takes the final step of breaking the equipment monopoly of the big vendors. This isn’t going to be easy and has the danger of moving back to a time when we test new radios by foisting them on the public. But the savings from ORAN are potentially gigantic, and if we’ve seen anything in the wireless industry, it’s that the lowest-cost option is going to get the most attention.

CoBank Touting Edge Computing

A recent article from CoBank is titled, Partnerships are Key for Rural Telecom Operators in Burgeoning Edge Computing Market. The article points out that there are potential opportunities for ISPs to grab a small piece of the edge computing market.

The article defines edge computing as a network architecture where data is stored and/or processed at locations close to where applications are being used. The growth of edge computing is an interesting phenomenon to watch because it reverse the trend of the last decade, where the goal was to move as much data as possible to large data centers and not process or store at the edge.

However, as the volume of data being generated by companies has increased exponentially, the tasks of moving data back and forth from data centers has added cost and time to the equation. Companies are looking deeper at the data they generate and are realizing that a lot of the data doesn’t need to be permanently cached at data centers. Companies also want to avoid the added latency from moving and processing things in a data center.

The article cites the following potential opportunities.

  • C-RAN. The trend identified is for cellular companies to process customer connection functions locally at cell sites instead of in the cloud. The opportunity for rural ISPs is to cell more connectivity to the expanding number of cell sites. However, is cellular data is processed locally, that would imply smaller transport bandwidth needed at each cell site.
  • Private Wireless Networks. The cellular carriers and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are likely to tackle this market. While there may be a few large customers in rural markets that want to participate in a private wireless network, the big opportunity is in selling the service to farms. Local ISPs can partner with one of the big application developers that will provide a communications suite for farms. The ISP opportunity will be selling transport to farms, but also possibly being hired to maintain farm wireless devices and monitors.
  • Internet of Things (IoT). This is the trend to develop smart sensors that can handle data locally without sending everything to a data center. Like with C-RAN, it seems like a stretch to see a role for a small rural ISP in the market other than perhaps being the local agent for the sensor devices.
  • Self-Driving Cars. The article relies on a prediction that a self-driving car will need to offload as much as 5,000 gigabits per hour of driving. I find it impossible to believe that anybody is going to invest in the network in rural areas that will ever serve this market. Most of the auto industry is chasing a future where vehicles will possess the needed computing power onboard rather than rely on somebody building a fiber network and billions of sensors along every mile of US highways. I was surprised to see this in the CoBank article since the chances of this happening seem slim.

The only opportunity on this list that might realistically materialize in the next decade and be a revenue opportunity for rural ISPs is private wireless networks for farms. It’s not hard to imagine a business relationship where rural ISPs become the local agent for smart farming connectivity and devices, in much the same way that many local ISPs were the agent for products like DirecTV. It’s not hard to imagine the rural ISP industry associations negotiating a contract for such services on behalf of members, making it easy to participate.

I was intrigued to see CoBank writing this article because bankers generally concentrate on opportunities that are either here today or on the immediate horizon. This article talks about pretty futuristic stuff. The question any rural ISP will ask is if any of these applications will ever become tangible and actionable. I remember a decade ago when the rage in the industry was telling rural ISPs that there was a lot of money to be made in fostering cellular offload to WiFi. I can’t think of anybody I know that ever made a nickel on the idea, but you couldn’t go to an industry meeting without somebody promoting the idea. There is a whole lot of steps that have to happen  before any of these edge-computing ideas turn into something that the average rural ISP can profitably participate in. But I have no doubt that some of the ideas in this article, or applications we haven’t thought of, will become real eventually. The one thing that rural ISPs have that is hard to duplicate is a local presence and local technical expertise.