Open RAN Commercial Readiness – The Importance of Partnerships 

Disrupting the status quo tends to bring out fierce opposition from those whose business model could be endangered. It is not a surprise that, despite Open RAN’s momentum with both greenfield and brownfield CSPs, some industry players are trying to sow skepticism among the adopters of the solution and associated technology, particularly about its commercial readiness compared to traditional vendor-locked solutions. 

It is undeniable that opening the RAN architecture and diversifying the vendor ecosystem may introduce additional complexity. That is a challenge that vendors are addressing with strategic partnerships, which are eliminating the barriers for commercial readiness of Open RAN. 

Being true advocates for open networks, the Mavenir team has understood from the beginning that the success of Open RAN is not tied to the efforts of a single vendor. For this reason, Mavenir has built an ecosystem of partners that provide solutions to the different integration and deployment challenges introduced. Hyperscalers have a critical role to play, since they provide the foundation that enables the virtual network elements to run on the cloud infrastructure.  

As detailed in a recent VMware blog, to accelerate the overall time to market of Open RAN deployments, VMware and Mavenir have committed to validating the commercial readiness of the Open virtualized RAN (Open vRAN) by implementing close technological collaboration. The research and development teams of both companies are validating Mavenir’s Open vRAN solution— which include Mavenir’s O-RAN compliant Distributed Unit (O-DU) and Centralized Unit (O-DU)—on VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform RAN. The joint solution allowed DISH wireless to deploy over 7,100 Open RAN cell sites—supporting over 40,000 radios—and meet the FCC-mandated deadline to cover 20% of the US population in just 14 months. 

This partnership is already producing industry action, as can be seen in the recent announcement of a multi-vendor partnership between VMware, World Wide Technology (WWT), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Mavenir, where WWT takes the role of systems integrator and provides a direct alternative to the incumbent RAN vendors for CSPs looking to deploy Open RAN but favoring the “one hand to shake” approach for vendor selection. 

For more information on Mavenir’s Open RAN solutions visit Mavenir’s Radio Access Networks page.