(by Bruno Giguère, DMTS)
Canoga Perkins attended the Big 5G Event (link) last week in beautiful (and hot) Austin, TX. Shout out to Light Reading, Omdia and InformaTech for a great event. As Canoga Perkins is looking at the RAN space for its upcoming new products, we wanted to check out what were the latest technology and market advancements from the 5G Ecosystem of CSPs, Suppliers and Standards Defining Organizations.
Did I mention Ecosystem? During a keynote panel discussion on Putting the Enterprise into Overdrive: Exploring 5G Use Cases and Lesson Learned, a panelist reminded all present that Ecosystem was “passé” and that she thought Metaverse would be a better term to use instead of Ecosystem. I kind of agree that the term Ecosystem might need to be revised, but not too sure about Metaverse as a replacement. I guess time will tell. Regarding Metaverse, it also came up in multiple other sessions which means that Metaverse is officially a mainstream subject. Now will this trend continue, I guess the coming months will provide an answer.
On the first day of the event was the Women in Telecoms Summit where Executive panelists addressed the reality of women in the telecom industry and what needed to change to promote equality. I had the opportunity to attend a great panel discussion lead by Sterling Perrin from Heavy Reading on Transport for Centralized RAN. This panel had the distinction of being an all women panel. Mrs. Sumithra Bhojan (AT&T), Ivy Kelly (CSpire) and Dashella Taylor (Fujitsu), thank you for your excellent presentation where we learned about the state of RAN from your point of view. It was very informative.
C-RAN, Cloud RAN, D-RAN, Disaggregated RAN, O-RAN, Open RAN, vRAN, … what the RAN? For the fortunate attendees attending Track 2: Radio Access Networks: The Evolution/Opening Up – of the event, we were
served with a large portion of acronyms related to Radio Access Networks. From the traditional RAN to the Open RAN Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) to the policy aspect of RAN to technology challenges such as network synchronization, all subjects were discussed and covered by great knowledgeable panelists.
Our key takeaway from the event is that for every Rakuten or Dish Network, there are multiple CSPs that have medium-term goal of deploying O-RAN/Open RAN, others that have PoCs underway and others that are looking at how they will implement this. The ‘state of readiness’ of O-RAN/Open RAN is still being debated as some see it adequate for deployment were others think it is in its early stages, but one thing is for sure, O-RAN/Open RAN is here to stay…
Photo of Canoga Perkins part of the crew attending the Big 5G Event.