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NEW DELHI: Mavenir, the open RAN or open radio access network provider said that the confusion on the non-proprietary radio access network prevails in the industry, and the US-based company rules out Finnish Nokia and Swedish Ericsson in the open radio network market.
“There is a lot of confusion in the market because the vendors, especially the competition, try to undermine the definition of open RAN in different ways. We don’t view Ericsson and Nokia doing real open RAN, it’s mostly lip service on their part. So we started to rule out Ericsson and Nokia in the market,” Bejoy Pankajakshan, EVP, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at Mavenir told ETTelecom.
However, the top executive added that the Korean Samsung appeared to be at least trying to grab mindshare to capture the open RAN market.
The comments from a top Mavenir executive come close on the heels of alleged exorbitant pricing by Nokia and Ericsson in the wake of locked radio interface, following which Mavenir sought intervention from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, last month.
“We stressed about opening up the brownfield X2 interface, making sure that we could mix and match, trying to avoid the confusion that’s been purposefully created by the competition,” the Mavenir executive said.
“In the case of X2, it’s a third generation partnership project (3GPP)- defined interface and is supposed to be open,” Pankajakshan said.
Unlike the two dominant hardware players, Mavenir said that telecom carriers could actually test and verify its open RAN-based solution from third parties.
The open RAN company said that two of its close rivals — Altiostar and Parallel Wireless — have bottlenecks as the latter is predominant in 2G and 3G wireless, while Rakuten’s recent acquisition of Altiostar, resulted in the former to shift to a custom-made portfolio.
“We have been investing in the space for the last six years to be successful in open RAN space,” Pankajakshan said, adding that they have deployments with more than 250 operators worldwide.
“The equipment that we get into our country, whether it is developed in India or overseas and imported, they will conform to these (5Gi) requirements which means telecom operators will be able to implement the LMLC capability and thereby provide extended coverage,” NG Subramaniam, chief operating officer of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Chairman, Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) told ETTelecom.
“We carry more than 80% of the world’s messaging, we have more than 300 million subscribers, billions of users on our system, which means they are very familiar with Mavenir as a software company,” the executive added.
Lately, the non-proprietary-based radio network approach is taking traction in India.
Last year, Bharti Airtel partnered with Mavenir to conduct Open RAN-based fifth generation or 5G field trials in the millimeter wave (mmWave) and mid bands, following its year-old association with Altiostar for the deployment of open virtual radio access network (vRAN).
In 2020, Vodafone Idea (Vi), in its ambition to build a robust and future ready 4G+ network, too teamed up with Mavenir.
Besides Pardeep Kohli-headed Mavenir, open RAN providers such as NXP and Qualcomm have already partnered with Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio while Samsung and Japanese NEC already maintain partnerships with Vodafone Idea.
Last year, Mavenir received an investment of $500 million which the company is spending in research and development (R&D) activities related to strengthening its 5G portfolio.
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