While the benefits of Open RAN (advantageous network economics and deployment flexibility chief among them) are widely touted, there are also well-articulated issues associated with the technology.
One question is whether operators are trading reduced capex related to RAN infrastructure for increased integration costs as someone has to do the work, and be paid for it, of integrating multi-vendor kit. There are also questions around the ability to scale Open RAN in a way that retains performance parity associated with an integrated infrastructure stack. And another issue we’ll explore further on this paper is around security.
