ノキアはOpenRANをラジオビジネスの未来と呼びます

ノキアは、無線アクセスネットワーク（RAN）市場で最大の競合他社のどれよりも多く、オープンRANとネットワーク仮想化を引き続き採用しています。今では、市場シェアを獲得し、事業者との契約を強化するのに役立つ可能性のある競争上の優位性と見なし始めています。Nokia, more than any of its largest competitors in the radio access network (RAN) market, continues to embrace open RAN and network virtualization. Now it’s starting to view it as a competitive advantage that could help it win market share and strengthen contracts with operators. “We see open RAN as an angle to take share,” particularly as more network operators require RAN suppliers to provide open RAN compliant equipment, Tommi Uitto, president of Nokia’s Mobile Networks unit, said during the company’s presentation for analysts and investors on Thursday. “If suppliers are not open RAN compliant, they risk losing share,” he said, adding that some operators will eventually need to adjust their supplier base. “Open RAN is a good mechanism for them to change that supplier base and increase supplier diversity.” RAN contracts resulting from those decisions will be spread across vendors who have committed to make open RAN compliant products, “which is really the future way of doing radio business,” Uitto said.  Nokia “will make the first fully open RAN compatible deliveries and deliver a fully virtualized RAN (vRAN) with hardware acceleration” later this year, he said.  Open RAN and vRAN are “big areas of focus for Nokia strategically,” but it’s still at a relatively early stage, and the company has more work to drive and develop the related ecosystems, Ed Gubbins, principal analyst at GlobalData, told SDxCentral.  “Nokia is definitely being proactive on the open RAN front, and that sets it apart from most of its top competitors,” he said. Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE haven’t voiced plans to support open RAN or vRAN and “Ericsson hasn’t pushed as hard as Nokia has in this area, so Nokia can distinguish itself there,” Gubbins explained.  Nokia is, however, on a similar track with Samsung with respect to vRAN development, he added.  “Open RAN is disruptive to Nokia’s traditional business but is absolutely the right thing to do,” said Chris Antlitz, principal analyst at Technology Business Research. “RAN will ultimately become open and virtualized. It is inevitable and is more a question of when than if. Nokia getting a head start on this long-term trend is a good thing.” While Uitto noted that it’s too early to forecast how big the open RAN market will be, he did point to Dell’Oro Group’s prediction that open RAN hardware and software will be near 10% of the total RAN market by 2025.  Projections for open RAN are scattered all over the map, and analysts are using different requirements or levers to determine what counts and what doesn’t count as open RAN. Dell’Oro Group said open RAN will surpass $5 billion in cumulative revenue through 2025, and ABI Research, for example, recently predicted that total capex on open RAN radios for public outdoor networks will reach $40.7 billion in 2026.  Indeed, the nuances and qualifying characteristics of open RAN may not matter much for the industry overall. Under Nokia’s approach, “we can win radio business, we can win baseband, we can win both. Actually we expect that even if some operators require open RAN compliance in the contracts, they may actually be still buying [radios] and basebands from the same supplier,” Uitto said.  That partially underlines why Nokia’s emphasis on the cloud and open RAN is important, according to Patrick Filkins, senior research analyst at IDC. “European [operators] have done a better job at uniting to press vendors to support this technology, but make no mistake, operators in Asia Pacific and North America have open RAN on their roadmaps as well,” he said.  “The real question will be how aggressive brownfield operators move on open RAN when the solution set is fully built out. Products spanning RAN and transport are being brought to market which can support open RAN, if and when the established operators want to deploy it,” Filkins explained.  Gubbins added that Nokia has also been promoting the use of open RAN controllers that support third-party apps for RAN optimization that could be tailored for the needs of operators and enterprises. “The idea of customizing the RAN for specific enterprise needs is interesting and aligns well with Nokia’s strategic focus on enterprise RAN opportunities,” he said.  “Nokia has demonstrated a lot of traction already in the enterprise RAN space, and most of it thus far has been focused on 4G LTE, so they’re positioned well to capitalize on 5G opportunities in the enterprise as those technologies mature,” Gubbins concluded.