LIVE FROM MWL UNWRAPPED: THE 5G EVOLUTION: Maite Aparicio, open RAN and RAN Innovation manager at Telefonica, stressed its long-term commitment to open RAN despite slowing a planned deployment, highlighting activity around the technology over the past five years.

In a keynote interview with Mobile World Live, Aparicio argued 5G deployments have been so fast it hasn’t had a window to work out how open cloud RAN infrastructure can be on par with the systems it already has deployed.

“This does not mean that Telefonica is giving up cloud RAN. Our commitment is there.”

Asked about an earlier goal (stated in 2021) for half its 5G deployments to use open RAN by 2025, she acknowledged it has faced various barriers preventing it from going live. “There are some challenges and concerns that we need to overcome before the massive adoption of open RAN.”

The challenges include high-capacity scenarios requiring hardware and software optimisation and the need to integrate the solution with its legacy infrastructure, which in some cases increases the complexity of the sites it has in place.

In addition, Telefonica has found it needs time reach the same maturity level with the new open RAN players as it has with the traditional RAN vendors, which offer reliable performance. “We also need time to ensure interoperability, because there are a lot of pieces, and we need to guarantee they are all going to work together.” 

She also highlighted the need for new skills to operate and manage the network in a different way.

Telefonica is working on two separate streams: testing virtualised architectures with the traditional RAN vendors and building new multi-vendor environments with the new entrants in the ecosystem.