Finland’s Nokia on Tuesday became the first major telecom equipment maker to commit to adding open interfaces in its products that will allow mobile operators to build networks that are not tied to a vendor.
The new technology, dubbed Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), aims to reduce reliance on any one vendor by making every part of a telecom network interoperable and allowing operators to choose different suppliers for different components.
I’m definitely not versed enough in low-level networking equipment to understand just how significant it is, but on the face of it, it does sound like a good move.
Thom Holwerda,
I don’t know anything about “Open RAN” either. All else being equal, open standards should always be preferred to proprietary ones. However it would need to be adopted by other vendors in order to be meaningfully useful. From the article (my emphasis):
As long as nokia is the only vendor implementing Open RAN, then it’s hard to see how it won’t fall short of “reducing reliance on any one vendor by making every part of a telecom network interoperable and allowing operators to choose different suppliers for different components”.
I’m not really well versed, but I hope they’re not creating a new standard that already exists in other projects, like https://www.openairinterface.org/.
This is basically a way for Ericson and Nokia to play catchup to Huawei. As various nations look to strip out chinese 5g systems, Nokia isnt looking able to meet the technical demands to be a 1 for 1 replacement for Huawei kit. This allows them to consolidate resources to at least reach feature parity. Right now Huawei win on functiality And price.