The Road for Open RAN in Telefonica

As we know, Open RAN will help network operators to expand business models by reducing  vendor lock-in, the enrichment of the RAN ecosystem and boosting innovation, but has challenges related with the time to market and extra integration costs like industry readiness, time to carry out interoperability tests and integration with legacy infrastructure

At Telefonica Open RAN work is in progress a with initial phases about to reach completion and massive deployments about to start, as we see from the figure, Telefonica already started phase 0 and phase 1, and is planning a massive deployment beyonf 2023.

Below are the selected  Open RAN hardware and software vendors by Telefonica to succeed in real deployments

Also, it is important to mention, that the intense activity around Open RAN (product design, pilots, industry messages, etc) has given to telefonica some important lessons indicating that there are challenges and concerns that must be solved before the massive adoption of Open RAN some of them are below :

1. Time to carry out interoperability tests

2. Multivendor environment

3. Site design in high-capacity scenarios

4. Parity of Open RAN software with traditional vendors

5. Containers based solution

6. Effective automation

7. Savings in initial deployments

8. System integrator role