• The shift towards open networking systems is regarded by many as a tide that will eventually raise all boats via innovation, even if it temporarily holes a few vessels on the way up
• But what does innovation look like? And is it worth all the disruption?
• To ponder this and more besides, TelecomTV held the Open Telco Infra Summit in mid November to discuss the continuing trend towards hardware and software disaggregation and openness

Openness in its various guises has been the dynamic powering every leap (or inch) forward in computing and communications for the past 40 years – the openness of the internet paved the way for the ecosystems, applications and services we enjoy (and sometimes moan about) today, while higher-level openness is being steadily advanced by software innovations, such as standard APIs and containers, and is being spurred on by regulation.

Now the development and deployment of open networking systems – once a contentious issue – is increasingly seen as a winning strategy and is gaining increasing attention and traction as a result of developments focused on open radio access network (Open RAN), an initiative spearheaded by the operator members of the O-RAN Alliance and based on the notion that the combination of open network interfaces and disaggregated network architectures will result in ‘innovation’, a quality the telecom industry is told it desperately needs.

The big question facing the network operators right now is whether a relatively fast transition to open systems, whether in the RAN or any other part of the network, will turn out to be worth the disruption, cost and risk involved. This, and other topics, were discussed during TelecomTV’s recent Open Telco Infra Summit.  

Open RAN – ready or not, here it comes… 

The summit’s sessions surfaced many of the possible reasons as to why there hasn’t yet been a telco stampede to deploy Open RAN technology. Could it be the inherent complexity of adopting it while also transitioning to cloud native and standalone 5G over a relatively short timescale and expecting each to ease the introduction of the other two? Perhaps.

However desirable it may be strategically, there are barriers and roadblocks to the adoption of new technologies, according to the summit’s participants, and one of the challenges most consistently raised is the skils shortage, often attributed to an unhelpful downcycle where telcos find themselves competing for scarce talent with better resourced and more popular occupational destinations such as big tech companies.

According to Francis Haysom, principal analyst at Appledore Consulting, while “there is a skills shortage, it’s not the one people think.”

The required technology skills needed to plan and deploy open telco infrastructure are generally all there, he says – what’s lacking more is the expertise associated with the much trickier area of understanding operational and business models and how to change or refocus them.

“It isn’t about developers and skills – it’s about how we move to a CI/CD/CT [continuous integration, deployment and testing] culture,” he says. The required technology exists – the real issue is about how telcos adapt their corporate culture to take advantage of it. “The skills that ARE missing are the ‘big picture transformation skills’ needed to harness that potential,” noted the analyst. 

The integration challenge

Are telcos doing enough to advance the new open ecosystems and open source software which, one way or another, is necessary to glue the components back together again?

“Generally speaking, no”, stated Manish Singh, CTO of the telecom systems business at  Dell Technologies. Operators need to get involved in the open source community as they “have to work out how they’re going to consume the necessary technologies,” noted Singh.

“Telcos need to step up,” agreed Terje Jensen, SVP of Network and Cloud Technology Strategy at Telenor (and, you’ve guessed it, a member of the DSP Leaders Council). “Yes, they are doing stuff, but they’re just not talking loudly about it.”

“They have to participate and invest more and not just adopt and consume,” added Vivek Chadha, SVP & Global Head of Telco Cloud at Rakuten Symphony. “For open source to thrive there’s growing recognition that we have to have active telco participation.”

And telcos would be pushing at an open door, suggested Paul Miller, Chief Technology Officer at Wind River, who believes there’s an opportunity for network operators to share their ‘requirements’ (for standards) with the community and see them taken into account and implemented.

So what’s stopping the telcos from getting involved?

“I think there could be some hesitancy, partly because they think they might have to provide code,” stated Miller.

Beth Cohen, SDN network product strategy specialist at Verizon Business, had a nuanced view. She agreed that telcos really needed to contribute to open source activities “where it makes sense,” but implied during this summit session that, in her experience, finding out how to contribute had “been a real struggle”, explaining that “people had relied on the vendors to do more of the heavy lifting” so had tended to engage from the specifications development process from a one-step-removed perspective. 

The takeaway from this discussion was that, however gently expressed, real differences over demarcation lines and responsibilities between the players in the ecosystem are an issue as changes in the technology landscape strengthen some ecosystem positions and weakens others. 

For instance, Cohen referred to changes in “the balance of power” with vendors taking back control by putting “proprietary software into the edge boxes”.

Loss of market power (or retaining the potential to wield it) always assumes a key role in the  strategic planning process when players are deciding their pace of change towards more open networks. This might explain why some show either hesitation or urgency, depending on where they think they are placed.

Of course, there may be alternative ways to reassemble a disaggregated network architecture into a working and evolving business system without having the extensive technical talent required to deeply understand the technology and master the tools well enough to do ‘everything’ in-house.

And the key approach there is, of course, to work closely with a systems integrator.

In part 2 of this article we will look at the role of systems integrators and other third party players as well as examine the evolving relationship between network operators and their technology suppliers as open and disaggregated systems get deployed.

- Ian Scales, Managing Editor, TelecomTV