Ericsson networks boss shares open RAN hopes and fears

“It’s a big, complex question,” said Fredrik Jejdling when asked about his organization’s current stance on open radio access network (RAN) technology. Jejdling manages Ericsson’s networks business, which generates about 70% of company revenues. A noisy infant today, open RAN is often depicted as one of the biggest future threats to this business. Even Ericsson believes it will account for about a fifth of RAN market sales by the end of this decade.

This poses a conundrum for Jejdling and his team. Ericsson has thrived as a vendor of integrated network technology, selling the whole batch of RAN products for a given site. Open RAN allows operators to mix suppliers, linking one vendor’s radios to another’s baseband kit, for instance. It could invigorate specialists previously excluded from projects because they lacked an “end-to-end” product portfolio. And some operators are scouting for RAN alternatives in what they perceive to be an oligopolistic market. Ericsson could suffer.

But opposing open RAN and the wishes of some customers for more interoperable products could backfire. In public, Ericsson professes to be no enemy of the concept and keenly involved in the work of the O-RAN Alliance, the group developing open RAN specifications. But it has also been accused by a highly placed telco source (who requested anonymity) of blocking open RAN efforts. And unlike Nokia, its Finnish rival, it boasts no products compatible with the O-RAN Alliance’s fronthaul spec – the interface between radios and baseband.

Jejdling’s concern is partly that O-RAN Alliance work could fork mobile technology, he told Light Reading at a meeting in London last week. He and his colleagues are now pushing for greater harmonization between that body and the 3GPP, the international umbrella group for mobile standards, he said. “We want to avoid bifurcation or trifurcation of these interfaces because then the whole premise for scalability for the overall industry is going to be reduced.”

Top performer

He clearly wants to avoid backing a technology that might still be problematic, too. “We want to make sure we can build high performance and drive cost efficiency for our customers,” he said. “High performance for me is producing the lowest cost per bit. We need to secure that requirement because otherwise we are not going to be relevant.”

At the very least, open RAN would entail a loss of the control and oversight that Ericsson enjoys when selling fully integrated products. It would no longer be a soloist but the member of a band. Even if it had one of the main parts, someone else could always fluff their notes. And other giant vendors have had concerns. “There are so many different implementation options,” said Tommi Uitto, Jejdling’s counterpart at Nokia, last June. “The standard is too open on that.”

Promoting a troublesome open RAN could undo all the hard work Ericsson has put into building its 5G technology reputation in the last few years. Jejdling was in London to show off his company’s latest power-efficient radios, able to boost capacity tenfold while reducing power consumption by 30%, according to the sales pitch. With customers pushing for supplier diversity in a RAN sector that is not growing, Jejdling knows he can only gain or defend market share – up six percentage points outside China, to 39%, since 2017 – by continuing to churn out such products.

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