One of the most common rebuttals lobbed at open radio access networks (RAN) is the perceived absence of “one throat to choke.” Executives at Dish Network and Rakuten Mobile say the argument is bunk.
The phrase is an ugly way to describe the responsibility that proprietary RAN vendors have, and their operator customers rely on, when challenges arise. And it’s also a rudimentary all-or-nothing mindset that fails to recognize how many things can go wrong in network architecture and how difficult it can be to pin the responsibility on one vendor to correct those wrongs.
Nonetheless, there is a widely accepted belief throughout the industry that proprietary, or fully integrated RAN vendors, present operators with one throat to choke, and open RAN vendors do not. Rarely anything, of course, is ever that simple.
“One thing we hear is ‘in the traditional model I had one throat to choke. I would go to one vendor and then they will be able to then figure out’ how to correct problems,” Azita Arvani, GM of Rakuten Mobile Americas, told SDxCentral in a phone interview.
The continuation of that argument is that if several different vendors are involved and something goes wrong, the vendors are all going to point at each other, effectively abdicating all responsibility to the network operator.
Rakuten Mobile Accepts Full Accountability
“With RCP (Rakuten Communications Platform) we’re saying we will be that one throat to choke. We will be that single accountability” entity “with the overarching intelligent operations that we put together,” she said.
RCP is an offshoot of the work Rakuten Mobile did to corrall software and hardware from many vendors for its greenfield network in Japan. Arvani is leading the company’s effort to resell to other operators a packaged and customizable services platform it assembled and pre-integrated based on offerings from multiple standalone and oftentimes competing vendors.
“That’s how looking at this multi vendor solution as one system helps a lot,” Arvani said. “We will be that one throat to choke, and we will provide the support for it so they [operators] don’t have to look at different places because it all ends with us.”
Dish Network Calls Argument Bunk
Dish Network, an aspiring greenfield operator in the U.S., also dismisses the notion that open RAN means operators lose all semblance of accountability among their vendors.
“Most networks have a plethora of vendors if you look at it. In fact I would say that we probably have fewer vendors, when you look at the entire ecosystem, than most incumbent carriers do,” Stephen Bye, EVP and chief commercial officer at Dish, said at an investor event last week.
“What’s interesting is when you deploy any one of these networks, the job of an operator is to do the integration. You can’t outsource the integration, you can’t give it to one party and have them do it for you,” he said. “It’s not just the radio, it’s the radio all the way through to the [business support systems], and each of those components need to come together.”
Network deployment, management, and maintenance “comes down to disciplined execution. That’s what’s needed,” Bye said. “And whether it’s open RAN or an incumbent network there really isn’t a difference in the number of partners that they have, it really is an integration exercise.”
He went on to contend that open architecture allows operators even more control. “We have much more visibility at every layer and within each of those interface points within each of the vendors, so we can actually manage that more effectively,” Bye said.
“We don’t actually see it as an impediment, in fact we think that it is a positive and the positive also extends to the security environment,” he said. “I think the notion that it creates an integration challenge is overplayed by people who have a vested interest in trying to manage the entire ecosystem, but it’s just not a valid argument.”
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November 26, 2020 at 01:30AM
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Rakuten and Dish Dismiss 'One Throat to Choke' Rebuttals - SDxCentral
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