Vodafone names vendors tapped for Britain's first wide-scale OpenRAN build: NEC, Dell, and Samsung Vodafone has revealed the first vendors included in its OpenRAN rollout as the telco starts to rip and replace its network infrastructure across Wales and the South East of England. The company first declared an intent to embrace OpenRAN last October, with the aim of replacing proprietary Huawei-made towers with alternatives …
It's too early yet to say how OpenRAN will turn out, but some sort of open solution is what has to be the answer to the problem, not just handing the market to a duopoly of Nokia and Erickson.
What is needed is a telecommunications equivalent of what Linux has done for the IT market. It provides a platform on which companies can provide services while minimizing vendor lock-in.
This is just a suggestion, but some sort of deep-dive into what this stuff is, how it works, and what it means would probably provide fodder for a continuing series of articles.
This initiative presupposes that Huawei is ignorant of OpenRAN, has no idea what it is, how its developed and deployed and how well it works in the field. This is expecting a bit much. Its likely that if Huawei could have provided solutions to customers based on open source code and generic computing units they would have, possibly replacing critical components with proprietary technology where there's a performance or cost advantage.
This suggests that the solution proposed by these companies is always likely to be second line, suitable for less dense service areas. It highlights the problem with politicians interfering with engineering decisions -- politicians in the UK just went in lockstep with what is now known to be a corrupt and incompetent administration who engaged in spurious bans and sanctions to gain political points rather than achieve any particular engineering goal (the primary goal of that administration was 'get power, keep power', nothing else).
I'm all for encouraging local expertise. As an engineer myself I've spend decades living with the dominance of financial people who have been reluctant to invest, greedy for immediate results and prone to sell out people and capabilities for a quick (and often just paper) profit. These decision makers belong in the same category as the company managers who (in the words of one ex-employee of a long defunct communications company) 'breathe engineers' -- they expect to hire when they can make money and fire when they can't. These day's there just isn't the people and what talent is available is spread through much wider (and potentially more lucrative) fields. So a quick headline grabbing initiative is unlikely to succeed -- you can't replace a systemic shortage of talent overnight.
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