The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) and the O-RAN Alliance have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) enabling O-RAN Alliance specifications to be adopted by ATIS. It builds upon previous MoU aiming to foster cooperation on areas such as stakeholder requirements and security in Open RAN.
In an analysis Open RAN journalists at ODIN noted that “The endorsement from the American organisation, an accredited standards body, is a positive move for the European based O-RAN ALLIANCE following the difficulties it faced in the US a few years ago due to the inclusion of US Government banned entities within its membership structure.”
Prior to this, ATIS had set out its own approach by defining an Open RAN “Minimum profile,” setting out some minimum requirements for any deployment. However, by adopting O-RAN specifications as well it reduces the risk of multiple different requirements, which makes designing Open RAN equipment a more straightforward and more globally applicable undertaking.
US Open
While the ITU’s vision for 6G published in December makes no mention of openness, this is an area which the US is firmly in favour of and promoting hard among its allies. Openness is one of the principles which the US government, inter alia, set out as a basis for the future development of 6G systems in February this year. In May, the NTIA set out more than $400m in funding to support the development of open radio units.
Meanwhile, even on security it seems as though the US is keen to see an open environment.
“Some may see a proliferation of interfaces as an increase in the attack surface,” noted US DoD’s Principal Director of FutureG Thomas Rondeau in April.
“I see it as a proliferation of possible control points.”
In a press release on the subject, ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller confirmed that “ATIS members both from industry and government sectors are highly aligned on the importance of Open RAN in creating an ecosystem of trusted suppliers that can deliver capable and cost-effective mobile network platforms.”
Good Coordination Problem To Have?
The O-RAN Alliance and the wider open networking movement has tended to operate on an independent but complementary path to industry standards bodies such as 3GPP and IEEE. Meanwhile regional bodies such as ATIS, ETSI and APT feed into 3GPP standards development.
There are clearly advantages in keeping bodies such as O-RAN Alliance independent from the formal standardisation process, not least insofar as they can develop capabilities in a way which is more responsive to the marketplace and which does not rely on standardisation bodies’ timelines. However, as they aim to create open, interoperable and standards-based solutions there is a degree to which they must always be playing catch-up on the standards which are agreed. If they wait for standards to be finalised they must inevitably be slowing down the market.
The way around this in practice is for a relatively small group of people within the major vendors and operator groups to work across both formal standards and the open alliances. They can coordinate both as formal and informal liaisons on what is possible or probable as upcoming features or activities across a variety of organisations and make sure that the work in different fora is complementary.
Seen through this lens, the coordination between ATIS and O-RAN Alliance seems like a fairly natural extension of the status quo.
However, there is a downside to this coordination between different bodies. While the process has evolved with good intentions for making workable and interoperable networks, in practice it means there are relatively few people within the telecoms industry who are functionally a pinch-point in the development of new generations of capabilities. Their viewpoint is liable to be heard consistently in multiple environments and if consensus among that group is reached, then it is liable to propagate through the various bodies they liaise with.
Conversely, it also means that influencing that relatively small constituency can have outsized effects in the development of both formal and de-facto standards.
