No room for Open RAN in Vodafone Idea's 5G plans

In a fairly wide-ranging interview with local outlet the Economic Times, Vi's chief technology officer Jagbir Singh said his company plans to begin offering 5G services across 17 of the country's 22 licensed service areas, or circles, as early as next March.

Fresh from ordering $3.6 billion worth of 4G and 5G network equipment from Ericsson, Nokia and now Samsung, Singh said Vi has also lined up towercos Indus, ATC and Tower Vision to host its kit, and expects to start gaining access to sites from the first half of November.

Delhi and Mumbai are due to be the launch cities, followed by all major cities and metropolitan areas in those 17 circles, he said.

It is understandable why Vi is in something of a hurry – its bigger rivals, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, have been offering 5G services since October 2022.

While those two have spent the last couple of years engaged in a 5G land-grab, Vi has been grappling with its financial woes.

In early 2023, the government became Vi's biggest single shareholder when it agreed to convert into equity INR161.3 billion ($1.95 billion) of debt it was owed by the operator.

That steadied the ship, but Vi still needed to plot a course forward. It did so earlier this year, raising INR180 billion ($2.2 billion) via a follow-on public offering (FPO) that will fund the first phase of its capex plan, which is as much about 4G as it is 5G.

Indeed, alongside its greenfield 5G deployment, Vi will also expand its 4G population coverage from 1.03 billion to 1.2 billion. Singh told the ET that Vi aims to reach this target by next June. He is banking on 900-MHz spectrum – which provides good wide-area and indoor coverage – to do the trick.

Vi is also testing the waters with virtualised RAN (vRAN). Singh said Vi will deploy aforementioned Samsung's vRAN kit in three circles – Karnataka, Bihar, and Punjab.

One nascent network tech Singh is less keen on, is Open RAN.

In the interview, he mentions a trial at 25 sites in partnership with US networking software specialist Mavenir.

"Initially we had a lot of hiccups," Singh said in the report. "There is no doubt about it – the maturity of Open RAN is still not there. In fact, TCO (total cost of ownership) is more expensive rather than being cheaper" than legacy RAN.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

As everyone knows by now, for Open RAN to be taken seriously, it has to equal or better the features, cost, and performance of legacy RAN. The huge amount of work that this requires is difficult and ongoing.

In August, Dell'Oro predicted that Open RAN will account for 25 percent of the global RAN market by 2028. However, it expects the majority of Open RAN networks will involve a single vendor. Multi-vendor Open RAN – which is pretty much Open RAN's raison d'etre – is expected to account for less than 10 percent of the market.

A big player like Vi ruling out Open RAN as a credible option for its greenfield 5G deployment will only raise further questions about the movement's prospects.