European Telcos Update Open RAN Technical Priorities

Five of the largest European wireless service providers are marking the beginning of a fourth phase of technical development priorities in their work to pursue Open RAN wireless architecture development, with the latest tech work to include steps on artificial intelligence and security.

According to a June 27 announcement from Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange S.A., Telefónica S.A., TIM S.p.A. and Vodafone Group Plc, those coming tech development priorities are laid out in the Open RAN Technical Priorities Release 4, which features security certification requirements and a commitment toward progress on zero trust security architectures.

Open RAN (Open Radio Access Network) architecture is a nonproprietary version of the radio access network that allows interoperability between wireless network equipment made by different equipment vendors.

The five Europe-based carriers have already worked through three iterations of technical priorities, including ones issued in each of the past three years. Those priority lists, they said, focused on different areas of development, the carriers said.

“Release 1 focused on the main scenarios and technical requirements for each of the building blocks of a multi-vendor RAN,” while “Release 2 mainly focused on intelligence, orchestration, transport and cloud infrastructure, addressing also the energy efficiency goals and targets to support sustainable Open RA,” they said.

The third release “mainly focused on developing requirements on SMO and RIC building blocks and to enhance other areas such as Cloud infrastructure, O-CU/O-DU and O-RU, addressing also the security topic to support more secure Open RAN,” the carriers said.

They said the latest release is primarily focused on developing further requirements on service management and orchestration (SMO) “especially related to AI/ML framework, interworking with traditional RAN and slicing management and on Security with MoU operator vision about the zero trust approach and requirements for certification and also on Cloud infrastructure mainly focused on O2 and Acceleration Abstraction Layer, while other areas have been significantly enhanced such as RAN software, O-RU and O-CU/DU.”

“This new release focuses in more detail on the RAN hardware acceleration topic and various challenges related to both the look-aside and in-line acceleration card models,” the carriers said. “In particular, the RAN HW acceleration requirements are now contained within a dedicated section of the MoU Technical Priorities document.”

The carriers said the latest release features priorities they consider important for Open RAN solutions, but added they should also serve as “guidance to the RAN supplier industry on where they can focus to accelerate market deployments in Europe, focusing on commercial product availability in the short term, and solution development in the medium term.”

The carriers also said the latest priorities will act as input into the Telecom Infra Project’s OpenRAN Release Framework.

“The overall objective is to promote a fast pace for the development of competitive Open RAN solutions in Europe, across other regions and ultimately accelerate the global adoption of the technology,” the carriers said.

“The Open RAN MoU Group technical priorities will evolve over time following the progress of Open RAN standardisation, in the respective standardization bodies, and the market development of Open RAN solutions,” they said.