Dell aims to work up the open RAN stack

INTERVIEW: Dennis Hoffman, SVP and GM of the Telecom Systems Business at Dell Technologies, outlined the vendor’s open RAN ambitions in an interview with Mobile World Live.

Dell has had early success in the market, scoring deals with Dish Network in the US and with European operators Vodafone Group, Orange, Telecom Italia and Deutsche Telekom.

Dell is currently “working up the stack”, Hoffman said, to create a reference architecture with partners VMware and Mavenir. Operators would be able to buy gear from all three knowing it would interoperate, and eventually Hoffman hopes the entire solution could be sold by a single vendor.

Hoffman is positioning Dell to serve operators as an integrator and as a hardware provider. He said operators will want a partner who can be accountable for both deployment and support of open RAN networks, a role he hopes Dell can fulfill.

Hoffman also highlighted the crucial role of automation in open RAN networks. “If we don’t find an automated way to manage that complexity these networks are going to quickly achieve a size and scale that humans can’t handle and the cost of ownership will actually be driven by the cost of maintaining it, not the cost of acquisition of new parts”, he warned.