CommScope sees market opportunities, TCO, ecosystem support and convergence all in favor of open RAN in the building

Reflecting on the typical 10-year cell generation cycle, as well as the roughly 20-year life cycle of a G, CommScope’s Luigi Tarlazzi, vice president of engineering, pointed out that attention historically shifts to building investments at about the mid point of the decade. So 4G was launched in 2010 and building investment increased around 2015. If you count the start of 5G around 2020, it means that the building step is on its way.

“This is happening now,” he told attendees at the Global Open RAN Forum, available upon request here. “We’ve started to see a huge increase in 5G deployments for large public spaces,” including stadiums, airports and the like. But what does this mean for Open RAN, which has similarly grown in interest as 5G builds?

Tarlazzi said investment in Open RAN “will continue and we will see wider and wider adoption of this new way of building cellular networks”. That includes, he said, multi-carrier in-building cellular systems and private cellular networks. He outlined the challenges carriers navigate around deploying Open RAN in legacy industrial networks; “Cellular in the building actually … is kind of the low-hanging fruit in terms of the risk that a (mobile network operator) would take to deploy a new technology in that environment.” In essence, in-building cellular networks and private networks are inherently greenfield and isolated from the macro grid.

“When there’s no coverage, you bring in new coverage,” he said. “It’s basically a greenfield scenario. … Inside is probably, chronologically, where we see — potentially see — the fastest adoption.” In addition to the macro opportunity, Tarlazzi highlighted the TCO benefits given the reduced local footprint and reduced power consumption compared to a traditional distributed antenna system (DAS).

And from an enterprise perspective, Tarlazzi said Open RAN is easier to use because it’s more IT-like than embedded. “There’s an opportunity, we think, to allow the enterprise to actually source some of the hardware they need, and then bring in the operators, the software and the RAN workloads, to actually operate the network.”

In terms of the ecosystem, he said there is an established pool of building specialists, including systems integrators, neutral host providers and managed service providers. “There’s already a proven ecosystem that supports what can come from carriers … and then it can be integrated into what’s being deployed locally … The in-house ecosystem is ready … to take ownership of these solutions.”

Tarlazzi then talked about convergence — the convergence of public and private cellular on a shared infrastructure, the convergence of licensed and unlicensed spectrum, and the convergence of multiple software elements for different use cases on a unified hardware platform. “We think we’re even more looking forward, seeing how quickly the network and technologies are evolving… there is a need to have a network in a place or in an enterprise that can scale and be updated seamlessly through the software.”