Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab): The debate in the UK on Huawei
has been around hardware, and clearly open RAN is the future. Can
you give an indication of two things? First, what are the
timescales for its development and deployment? Secondly, because we
have got operators currently taking out Huawei kit and putting in
Ericsson or Nokia kit, how do you incentivise those companies to
take the open RAN approach in terms of developing a market for that
product? Where are we at internationally...Request free trial
(North Durham) (Lab): The debate in the UK on Huawei has
been around hardware, and clearly open RAN is the future. Can you
give an indication of two things? First, what are the timescales
for its development and deployment? Secondly, because we have got
operators currently taking out Huawei kit and putting in Ericsson
or Nokia kit, how do you incentivise those companies to take the
open RAN approach in terms of developing a market for that product?
Where are we at internationally on open RAN compared with other
countries?
Pardeep Kohli, CEO, Mavenir: Let me start. You are
right that until now it was all about hardware, because people were
building proprietary hardware to supply radio products. When you do
hardware-based solutions, the scale matters, because you need
logistics, manufacturing capability and factories, and obviously
Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia had a strong base and the logistics set
up.
When you do open RAN, it is more software leaning on
general-purpose hardware. Companies like us do not need
manufacturing plants any more because we are only providing
software, and we have the advantage that our software can run on a
private cloud that an operator can build on, for example, standard
Dell servers—there are plenty of them, and people can build
those—or we can run it on a public cloud on Amazon or Google. If you look at the
scale that Google, Amazon and Azure have, Huawei is
nowhere close to their scale. In that sense, the whole matter of
Huawei’s scale does not matter at all the moment you move a
hardware problem to a software problem...
(Newcastle
upon Tyne Central) (Lab): What you are saying is that
although you could deliver a full-service 2G, 3G, 4G or 5G network
tomorrow, that is not what our mobile operators want. They want an
incremental improvement from what they have to what they need to
provide services. The cost is a real issue. The transition from 4G
to 5G/open RAN is part of the challenge, and we need to understand
better how the Government can support that. You talked about making
it easier to roll out new open RAN sites. I am interested to know
whether there are other ways in which the Government could support
that.
Stefano Cantarelli, Global Chief Marketing Officer,
Mavenir: I add that this transformation in the core
infrastructure has already almost happened. Already, most of the
core infrastructure of the MNOs is running on general-purpose
hardware, such as Dell servers and so on, with software on top of
it. The RAN is really the last one to be transformed, for the
reason that I gave, and also because, as I said, the market has
been dominated by some suppliers who have been providing hardware
and software, because they work with better interfaces between the
radio access component.
:
Thank you. That is very helpful. That makes me think that
there are security issues arising from, for example, having our
cloud infrastructure dominated by one vendor, such as
Amazon Web
Services. Those are perhaps future security issues that we
need to look at. I now understand much better what you need to
support your transition, so thank you very much for that...
To read the whole session, CLICK
HERE
|
