Against the four major equipment manufacturers? Open RAN Policy set up by 31 companies
On May 5, a group of emerging RAN suppliers such as Altiostar, Mavenir, Airspan, Parallel Wireless, Samsung Network and others tweeted that we are very honored to be a founding member of the Open RAN Policy Alliance.
The emotion of excitement and joy is beyond words.
What is the Open RAN Policy Alliance?
On May 5, the Open RAN Policy official website announced that 31 global technology companies today launched the Open RAN Policy Alliance to promote the Open RAN policy.
Open RAN is trying to develop and adopt open and interoperable solutions in the Radio Access Network, breaking vendor lock-in, letting operators mix-and-match components, reducing TCO and increasing performance
In Simple it is hoped to subvert the RAN market which monopolized by the four traditional giants :Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE.
Currently, there are two major organizations in the Open RAN ecosystem: OpenRAN and O-RAN.
OpenRAN is a project in the TIP alliance launched by Facebook in 2016. The O-RAN alliance was established in February 2018, which was formed by the merger of the original C-RAN alliance and the xRAN forum. Among them, the C-RAN alliance is mainly composed of Chinese companies, and the xRAN forum is mainly has members such as AT & T, NTT DOCOMO, etc. and European companies.
So what is the new Open RAN Policy alliance?
Note the alliance’s statement, “Promote the Open RAN policy.”
From the statement point of view, this is not like a technical organization, but more like a lobbying team, aimed at lobbying countries, especially the US government, to support Open RAN in terms of policy or funding.
After all, the US has no RAN equipment supplier giants, and some US officials have expressed their hope on Open RAN.
In fact, from the perspective of the composition of 31 members, this alliance is also very “American”, and a large number of members come from the United States.
The founding companies are: Airspan, Altiostar, AWS, AT&T, Cisco, CommScope, Dell, DISH Network, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Mavenir, Microsoft, NEC Corporation, NewEdge Signal Solutions, NTT, Oracle, Parallel Wireless, Qualcomm, Rakuten, Samsung Electronics America, Telefónica, US Ignite, Verizon, VMWare, Vodafone, World Wide Technology, and XCOM-Labs
These members are divided by field as follows
Operators
AT&T, Verizon, DISH from USA; Vodafone, Telefonica from Europe; Rakuten and NTT from Japan。
Cloud Service provider
Amazon AWS, Microsoft, Google、IBM, VMWare。
Telecom equipment supplier
Airspan、Altistar、Mavenir、NEC、Parallel Wireless、Samsung、Cisco、Juniper Networks、Fujitsu、CommScope。
And Airspan, Altistar, Mavenir, and Parallel Wireless are OpenRAN members of the TIP alliance, and they are all startups from the United States.
It is understandable that these emerging RAN suppliers are so excited. After all, with this lobbying team, the dream of sharing the cake with the giants of traditional equipment manufacturers is one step closer. But how far will this dream come true? Many people in the industry said that it will take at least 3-5 years for Open RAN to mature.