Light Reading Podcasts

Michael Murphy, CTO of wireless for North America with Nokia, joins the Light Reading podcast to examine areas where open RAN needs to be fleshed out for vendors and service providers to reap the full benefits of this technology. Murphy recently wrote a Guest Perspective column for Light Reading about the limitations of open RAN and the importance of developing standards to help the technology mature. "The [open RAN] principles are good to opening up the system to more vendors but there are some challenges along the way," says Murphy in the podcast. "The purpose of that article was to lay them out. It's not saying that we, Nokia, think they're not surmountable, it just takes a little time. From the standards perspective, and this is a very important point by the way, we believe the whole concept of open RAN won't follow unless it's based on standards." He adds that the industry is relying on the O-RAN Alliance to develop open RAN standards, but "we don't really have the full suite of specifications at a maturity level that is good enough to build an end-to-end O-RAN compliant system yet, so more time is required." In addition, Murphy discusses the importance of meeting parity in the open RAN journey, which he describes in his article as "the set of features or capabilities available with O-RAN-compliant products that should, minimally, be the same as those deployed today and in the future with incumbent, integrated solutions."