What’s the Best Way to Get to Open RAN?

Mobile operators have increasingly committed to moving to Open RAN, but the timing and deployment options vary among them. Crucial to the success of implementing Open RAN is the choice of a migration path toward a fully virtualized and disaggregated architecture.

This paper examines how operators facing different transport costs can maximize pooling gains for different 5G cell profiles. There are pooling gains for operators that deploy DUs at the cell site, and for those that co-locate DUs and CUs in remote data centers, but they come from different sources. Net TCO reductions range from 12 – 42%.