At Telecom Europe LIVE a distinguished panel debated the risks of RIC and the best potential use cases
The panel discussion, RIC (for radio intelligent controller) and the roll-out of Open RAN was moderated by Malik Saadi, VP Strategic Technologies, ABI Research. The panellists were Paul Ceely, Director of Technology Strategy at Digital Catapult and Richard MacKenzie, Distinguished Engineer at BT, He is Co-chair RAN Intelligence & Automation (RIA) at Telecom Infra Project (TIP) with Vodafone and T-Mobile USA. The third member was Neil McRae, Chief Network Strategist, Juniper Networks and formerly Chief Architect at BT.
Watch the video to hear more insights.
Saadi said the panel would examine outline what RIC is, what it can do, the business case and the challenges of implementing it. He observed that, as a starting point, mobile operators needed to build the right skill sets across many technologies and businesses to tap into opportunities promised by the RIC. Hence they must be less risk averse and willing to collaborate with different parts of the supply chain to create services otherwise would not be possible.
Neutral host first commercial opp?
MacKenzie work in applied research at BT and the unit acts as technology consultant for potential lines of business. EE and BT Business are the divisions primarily interested in RIC, in opportunities like neutral host private networks for early commercial deployments. He says, “Like most people, when we first got involved in Open RAN we focused on fronthaul. That’s matured and is one area where we see successful multi-vendor interoperability. Now we’ve turned to the next big opportunity, RIC.
“The way we’ve been trying to build Open RAN is not so much wait until the technology is ready [then deploy]…we’re working on a number of things in parallel to standardisation.” This includes close engagement with TIP which MacKenzie explains, “Is learning by building and feeding back into the industry what they’ve learned.”
Optimisation, then some
Juniper Networks’ McRae said most of its customers don’t want to talk about RIC technology but know about the services it can offer and they can monetise. He said although there is much talk of network slicing, he’s not so sure it is a massive moneyspinner but describes RIC as biggest technological opportunity “for a while”.
He asks, “How can RIC be used to improve handover between cell sites, and so that people watching this on live stream could pay for a premium service to watch it in high definition without interruptions.” McRae says that optimisation should be “telecoms 101”, though, so “what can RIC do to help operators sell more stuff?”.
He thinks the answer is by bringing a totally different class of experience to users via guaranteed levels of service, such as optimising experience in locales such as stadia, schools, a university campus or factory, especially where various types of reality are involved.
Differentiated services
Ceely added, “An extension of that is if you’ve got say nationwide, private networks or utilities running mission critical services alongside others then you might want to optimise the other services differently. That’s where an operator could choose to develop some way of optimising their network that aligns very closely with a particular customer segment to offer differentiated services…and you might do that for different segments.”