Putting More Open Into Open RAN Certification

The Global Coalition on Telecommunications (GCOT) has published a set of principles it hopes can help industry stakeholders maximise the potential of Open RAN certification, which is seen as crucial to accelerating the commercial adoption of the technology. The initiative aims to address the growing demand for efficient, scalable, and trustworthy certification processes for all use cases, including the emerging opportunities like Private Networks. Focusing on three main areas, the proposal provides recommendations on improving certification governance, cost effectiveness, and facilitating adoption

By eliminating the need for extensive and costly integration and in-house testing, certification reduces entry barriers for new products and provides a faster route to market. Certified components, product combinations, and full stack solutions, ensure compatibility across multi-vendor environments, providing operators with confidence that deployments will function as intended.

The past year has seen significant investments in Open RAN certification, primarily by the US Government through the NTIA’s Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund which allocated $140 million to establish new test and certification facilities on home soil. Beneficiaries included AT&T, Boost Mobile (formerly DISH Wireless), and VIAVI, which have since launched state-of-the-art labs. USAID also funded the development of an Open RAN lab in the Philippines, underscoring the technology’s strategic importance to the USA both at home and abroad. 

Last year also saw the North American standards organisation ATIS adopt O-RAN ALLIANCE specifications into its body of work and publish its first Minimum Viable Profile (MVP) for Open RAN, streamlining certification criteria. In Europe, the Open RAN MoU (comprising of leading MNOs Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Vodafone) published the fourth release of its technical priorities, which like the ATIS MVP, aim to provide a minimum set of requirements, including test and certification plans, for new Open RAN products.

Taken together, these developments suggest progress is being made towards at least building more capacity into the system. The challenge now lies in ensuring the right level of alignment between different regions, industry organisations, and standards and certification bodies. Indeed from the outside looking in, there is still no clear progressive link between different certification programs and no clear framework on avoiding testing duplication in different labs and for different markets. Ironically, it seems Open RAN is suffering from a lack of openness and interoperability when it comes to certification. 

To address this GCOT, established in 2023 by the governments of Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US, outlines a number of measures it believes governments and industry stakeholders should implement to improve and build on existing work led by organisations like the O-RAN ALLIANCE and the Telecom Infra Project.

Some of the key recommendations GCOT makes include:

• The need for certification testing to focus on four primary areas, namely conformance, interoperability, and performance. This should be undertaken with the appropriate levels of oversight and transparency to avoid bias and maintain trust. 
• Certifications issued should be independently verifiable and repeatable by other qualified labs through consistent and standard testing protocols, without regard to geography. So a product certified in one region should automatically gain accreditation elsewhere. 
• The structure of certification needs to better consider customer demand and the varied needs and scales of different deployments, rather than simply gating criteria for the next step of certification. 
• Certification should be accessible to companies of all sizes and barriers to implementation should be minimised. This is an area where governments will have an important role to play through supporting the harmonization of standards internationally and providing financial support through subsidies and grants.
• Developing a recertification process that is expeditious, meaningful, and cost effective determined based on criteria such as standards evolution, specific use cases, regulatory compliance, industry best practices, risk assessment, stakeholder feedback, historical data, and the technical and operational context of the deployment.

Finally GCOT notes that none of this will be achievable without considerable support from governments and industry alike. From a government perspective the main point is that this will require considerable financial investments. The telecom industry has already shown itself unwilling or incapable of shouldering the full financing burden of building the infrastructure needed to certify new Open RAN products every step of the way, from proof of concept to live deployment. The US Government’s $140 million investment presents quite a high benchmark few other countries will be able to match, but at least it’s measurable.

What is harder to quantify is how industry organisations will work together to deliver a framework that can effectively incorporate GCOT’s suggestions. So far, and in contrast to Open RAN’s guiding principles, we have few examples of open interoperability between industry bodies. This is especially difficult to explain given the fact that representatives from the same companies sit on the boards of nearly all these organisations. Solving that problem feels far more complex than solving Open RAN.