One of the hottest topics which has emerged recently in the telecommunications industry is the recent rise of interest in development of Open Radio Access Networks (RANs), which will have far-reaching implications for the telco sector and eventually the enterprise networking space. Open RAN is essentially the increasing cloudification and disaggregation of RANs, which will give telcos and eventually enterprises increased vendor choices, as well as higher levels of customization when building a wireless network. Open RAN is quickly gaining momentum around the world and is creating new business models which could be massively disruptive to the telecommunications industry.
The concept of an Open RAN has been postulated for many years, as the telecommunications industry has long sought to realize the benefits that enterprise networks have realized via adopting cloud computing. Open RAN can be defined as a movement to create vendor-neutral hardware and software that is interoperable for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G networks. It is important to note that the term “Virtual RAN,” or “vRAN,” is sometimes used interchangeably with Open Ran, but this is not technically correct as vRANs can still be closed and provided by one vendor; however, the concepts are closely related as most 5G Open RAN deployments will also be virtualized.