Altiostar CEO: Open RAN will dominate in 3 years

Altiostar has been pushing for open radio access network (RAN) interfaces and architecture since CEO Ashraf Dahod founded the company in 2011.

Nearly a decade later, that vision has become a force that is poised to upend one of the most critical components of mobile networks. Open RAN has made considerable strides and while it’s not the dominant technology framework for mobile networks today, Dahod is confident that will change soon.

“There is now a significant global movement to go to open RAN,” he told SDxCentral. “In the next three years, economic forces will drive operators to go to open RAN.”

With multiple surveys indicating that customers are largely unwilling to pay extra for 5G connectivity, economics are going to force operators to seek out deployments that carry lower costs, Dahod explained. With open RAN, operators’ capex can be reduced up to 40% and opex can be cut by about 30%, he said.

“The incumbents are supplying an all-in-one — it’s proprietary software running on proprietary hardware — and you’re going to buy everything from them,” Dahod said. “If you want to add a new service, you have to pay them millions of dollars to develop the software. And if you have three suppliers, you’re going to pay money to all three of them, and you can launch a service only when all three of them are ready.”

That model is running out of runway, according to Dahod. “Everything is moving to webscale,” he said. “The webscale wave in the radio is inevitable, and it’s just a matter of time. The benefits you get in terms of automation, the robustness of the network, fault recovery, being able to launch services when you want rather than being a prisoner to a supplier — the benefits are significant.”

Incumbent vendors also maintain silos around software, different generations of cellular technology, and the various types of hardware required, Dahod said. Altiostar, conversely, supports small cells, indoor and outdoor macro antennas, millimeter wave (mmWave), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), 4G, and 5G technology on a single software layer. That approach enables operators to “plug in different hardware suppliers depending on who provides you with the best value.”

Under that framework, value-added functions and services have become virtual network functions (VNF) or containers instead of dedicated hardware, he said. “The operator has the freedom to mix and match, and since we are completely virtualized, if they want to launch a new service, now they can have the software developed by anybody.”

―SDX Central