Open RAN as one of the many vectors to close the digital divide
In my conversation at a recent Cisco Live event in Las Vegas, there were several recurring themes, but for the sake of this part I will focus on two: the relationship between innovation and cost as a function of the driving (or not driving) scale, and the need to bridge the digital divide. সম্পর্কিত Related to two thematic threads. Innovation reduces the cost that drives the scale, and innovation is needed to connect the unconnected to the meaningful scale.
And all of this applies to specific areas of connectivity, such as Open RAN, which fully meets the need to connect more than 3 billion people worldwide without reliable access to broadband. Discusses Open RAN, Cisco EVP and GM Mass-scale [emphasis added] Infrastructure group Jonathan Davidson puts it this way: “Open interfaces drive innovation and innovation at low cost, and low cost means we can connect more people. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there. ”
It is also a consistent belief structure. At the Mobile World Congress in Los Angeles in September 2018, at a time when the X-RAN Forum and the C-RAN Alliance were meeting in the O-RAN Alliance to conduct relevant standardization activities, Davidson told me the same thing about how to solve problems. Multi-vendor radio integration. “Well-defined open interfaces are critical,” he said at the time. “It’s important that we all work towards a quality environment with an open interface. Then the decoupling of these systems becomes possible.”
It became possible; In fact, Open RAN is a hot topic in the telecom world right now. Partly because some operators are facing on-or-less financing orders for rip-and-replace Chinese networking gear, because Open RAN promises less capex and Opex, because RAN vendor integration creates an underlying supply risk that can be resolved. Through vendor diversification, and partly because the policy or openness and virtualization sets the stage for the deployment of RAN workloads in the cloud and reaps rewards from dynamic optimization, software-centric programmability, and automation. Go back to the Primaze section, tick the Innovation and Cost box. But how does that relate to more connections?
Ask Vodafone UK They leaned towards Open RAN and illuminated 2,500 planned sites, the first of which is at the Royal Welsh Showground in Polynesia, Wales. I know where Wales is-not particularly sure about the police কিন্তু but I’m sure it’s not a historically five-time place. When it happened in 2020, Vodafone UK CTO Scott Petty called it a “significant milestone” and said Open RAN “could make us less dependent on our current larger technology providers, and find ways to reduce the cost of rolling out mobile coverage.” RAN could also help bridge the digital divide between urban and rural Britain. ” So there are more connections and cost pieces again.
You may be saying, this is just an example to close the digital divide of Open RAN. Here’s another one: Orange 2020 is set to expand its coverage in the Central African Republic with parallel wireless with Open RAN. In addition to expanding coverage, Orange wanted to use more connectivity to provide its mobile banking service, Orange Money, which may not be an innovation for everyone but for those of us without banking it must be innovative, not to mention safe, secure, non-cash transactions. Reliable access.
You could say, well, that’s just two examples. Here’s more: Inland Cellular in the United States, MTN in Liberia, Nigeria and Vodafone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa.
More than Scale Piece, Vodafone and Orange, and Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, are all committed to the scale of Open RAN. These commitments give space to relevant vendors to run and, at least you think, with scaled deployments cost less, more connections come, more innovation comes, washes away, repeats.
“I think O-RAN is inevitable now,” Davison said. “I think there is a lot of motivation. I think long-term inspiration is always going to be innovation and the fact that you can manage the network fundamentally differently … I think long-term innovation actually drives the agenda. ”
His colleague Masum Mir, vice president and general manager of Cable, Mobile and IoT, has just returned from Open RAN in the larger picture of taking the costs of setting up the network. “Cisco strongly believes in the economic equation that if we do not take structural costs, it will further disconnect those who have and those who do not.” I think our obligation should not be forgotten [connectivity] More affordable. ”
There’s a great book, Good economy for difficult times Abhijit V. By Banerjee and Esther Duflo, it contains perhaps my favorite examples of how even simple connections can lead to simple innovation and improve economic outcomes. From that book: “The impact of the introduction of cell phones on fishing in the Indian state of Kerala is a clear example of misallocation. Fishermen in Kerala would go out early in the morning to catch fish and return to shore at midnight to sell their fish. Before cell phones, they would land at the nearest beach, where their customers would meet them. The market will continue until there are no buyers or the fish run out. Since the catch was quite varied from day to day, some beaches had a lot of spoiled fish, while others had often frustrated customers. This is a shining example of misallocation. When the cell phone connection became available, the fishermen began to move forward to decide where to land; They will go where lots of customers are waiting and not many boats. As a result, waste was largely eliminated, prices stabilized, and both customers and sellers were well off. ”
It didn’t end there. As fishermen visit new beaches, they interact with new boat builders. From there, those who were able to build better boats got more business and the quality of the fleet, as it were, improved. As good boat builders have scaled (there’s that word again), boat prices have dropped.
Banerjee and Duflo wrote, “What these two stories have in common is that a barrier to communication leads to misallocation. When communication improves, the same resources are better used, resulting in higher. [total factor productivity]Since more work has been done with the same input. ”
Somewhere along the line there is an offensive “Teach a man to fish” typeline but I will not tease it in time. The point is that both the fishing and boat building examples illustrate the innovation / cost / scale aspects of our discussion and highlight how digital segmentation can accelerate the bridging cycle. But this is just one example in one place, just as the open RAN installations listed earlier are similarly non-expansive. But think flywheel effects; Do this enough times and start calculating the many small wins and see the bigger, better picture comes into focus.