What does the 5G landscape look like without Huawei?

Chin­tan Patel is pret­ty relaxed about Huawei exit­ing the UK’s embry­on­ic 5G com­pet­i­tive land­scape, fol­low­ing the government’s deci­sion to rein in the Chi­nese tech giant’s hold over this country’s tele­com infra­struc­ture. Recent months, he notes, have already seen big busi­ness­es seal deals with oth­er oper­a­tors. It’s a sign of renewed con­fi­dence.

“Obvi­ous­ly there’s going to be a lot of focus on cost sav­ings now among net­work providers,” says Cisco’s UK and Ire­land chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer. “Sup­pli­ers are going to be look­ing to do more with less. There’s the impact of the pan­dem­ic too and the issue of momen­tum in the mar­ket­place in terms of device avail­abil­i­ty. I still think we can expect 5G to devel­op over the com­ing years at a slow but steady pace.”

How­ev­er, he adds, with one stark dif­fer­ence: if 5G might once have been expect­ed to be the pre­serve of the tele­com giants build­ing huge net­works – if not Huawei, then the likes of Eric­s­son or Nokia – then now it’s increas­ing­ly pos­si­ble it will instead be pro­vid­ed by a con­glom­er­a­tion of small­er enter­pris­es. “What we’re see­ing is a fun­da­men­tal shift going on here,” says Patel.

Opening the 5G competitive landscape up

Pao­lo Pesca­tore at tele­coms indus­try ana­lysts Fore­sight con­curs: “There’s now going to be an oppor­tu­ni­ty in this 5G mar­ket not just for big play­ers, includ­ing those out of the Unit­ed States and Japan, but for a lot more small­er play­ers.

“The ques­tion is whether these small play­ers are ready for the UK’s 5G com­pet­i­tive land­scape. Small­er com­pa­nies make for a more frag­ment­ed approach, which comes with its own chal­lenges, such that some stan­dard­ised plat­form may be required. What’s required is an assess­ment of how best to work with new play­ers to ensure a smooth tran­si­tion.”

But clear­ly it’s not just the scal­ing back of Huawei that lies behind this shift in the 5G com­pet­i­tive land­scape. Ste­fano Cantarel­li, chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer for Mavenir, provider of end-to-end net­work soft­ware, argues that two fac­tors are key to its future, not just dis­ag­gre­ga­tion, but what is termed vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion.

This refers to the 5G net­work allow­ing for the divi­sion of hard­ware resources into func­tions that can be con­trolled by soft­ware, ulti­mate­ly enabling those resources to be allo­cat­ed to ser­vice the needs of spe­cif­ic cus­tomers with­out requir­ing com­pli­cat­ed adjust­ments to phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture. That, he says, will enable this new ecosys­tem com­pris­ing many new com­pa­nies, not least inte­gra­tors spe­cial­is­ing in pulling every­thing togeth­er.

What is openRAN?

Vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion has, on paper at least, also cre­at­ed a mar­ket for what’s known as open­RAN, radio access net­works com­pris­ing off-the-shelf hard­ware and soft­ware com­po­nents from sev­er­al ven­dors and oper­at­ing over open net­works. Not all oper­a­tors will be con­fi­dent in tak­ing the option, but Voda­fone UK has thrown down the gaunt­let in begin­ning open­RAN tri­als, ini­tial­ly for 4G, with soft­ware sup­pli­ers Par­al­lel Wire­less and Mavenir, and could deploy an open­RAN 5G net­work by 2025. Look out too for open­RAN soft­ware start­up Altiostar.

“This approach is going to give oper­a­tors a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to select each best-in-class ele­ment to make the best net­work for their spe­cif­ic needs. It’s a chance not to rely on one mono­lith­ic ven­dor,” says David Levi, chief exec­u­tive of net­work­ing soft­ware com­pa­ny Ether­ni­ty. “The sit­u­a­tion in the UK isn’t much dif­fer­ent to that across the rest of Europe. Post-Huawei some oper­a­tors are scram­bling for a solu­tion, but oth­ers will now take their time to do some home­work.”

After all, this com­ing mul­ti-play­er approach is still unproven and pos­es all sorts of com­pli­ca­tions, secu­ri­ty issues for exam­ple, or respon­si­bil­i­ty for main­te­nance when there’s any kind of out­age. Giv­en this, whether the 5G com­pet­i­tive land­scape in the UK embraces emerg­ing sup­pli­ers or sim­ply dou­bles down on the remain­ing big guns – Eric­s­son and Nokia are the only com­pa­nies bar Huawei to pro­vide com­plete 5G net­works – remains uncer­tain. As Kester Mann, direc­tor of con­sumer and con­nec­tiv­i­ty for tech ana­lysts CCS Insight, notes: “Oper­a­tors do tend to be risk averse.”

Hence, the rel­a­tive pauci­ty of 5G mobile phones avail­able so far, near­ly all from Sam­sung or Oppo, a Chi­nese brand that launched in the UK only last year. Nobody is exact­ly rush­ing into 5G in the UK, not least because of the huge infra­struc­ture that needs to be put in place. And this may well be no bad thing.

Business leads on 5G

Cer­tain­ly, for all the con­sumer buzz around the com­ing of UK 5G, it’s not with con­sumers that its future real­ly lies, but with dri­ving enter­prise. “Con­sumers won’t pay more for a ser­vice they can’t get every­where, espe­cial­ly when the costs [of devel­op­ing a 5G net­work] will like­ly be passed on to them,” says Pesca­tore at Fore­sight. Until there’s some leap in demand for data, through gam­ing per­haps, 4G remains more than ade­quate for most uses.

Rather, as Cisco’s Patel agrees, the real val­ue propo­si­tion for 5G lies with busi­ness and what it can do with atten­dant tech­nolo­gies such as the inter­net of things, new sen­sors and meters. That’s why Cis­co has launched a UK pro­gramme focus­ing on bring­ing 5G to rur­al “not spots” to aid more remote indus­tries like agri­cul­ture, fish­ing and renew­able ener­gy. And why Voda­fone has already start­ed to build the UK’s first pri­vate 5G net­work for the oil and gas indus­try.

Busi­ness needs reli­a­bil­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty and so, for the next cou­ple of years at least, it’s like­ly that those seek­ing to be at the lead­ing edge of using 5G in the UK will turn to Eric­s­son and Nokia, with lega­cy expe­ri­ence of man­ag­ing the 4G LTE (long-term evo­lu­tion) net­work that the non-stand­alone ini­tial incar­na­tion of 5G is based on. Then look out for Sam­sung that has recent­ly struck a $6.6- bil­lion deal with Ver­i­zon in Amer­i­ca and, though it’s been con­ser­v­a­tive in chas­ing West­ern mar­kets, may be chang­ing its mind giv­en the post-Huawei UK land­scape.

“The fact is that right now open­RAN is just not as good as pur­pose-built net­works from the likes of a Nokia,” argues Daryl Schoolar, prac­tice leader for fixed and mobile infra­struc­ture at tech con­sul­tan­cy Omdia. “It’s worth remem­ber­ing that 5G itself is still an imma­ture tech­nol­o­gy, lay­ered up with vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion, anoth­er imma­ture tech­nol­o­gy. But then it’s also worth not­ing how recent years have shown just how quick­ly tech­nol­o­gy can advance.”