MWL UNWRAPPED: Mavenir president and CEO Pardeep Kohli (pictured) predicted 5G would be the final generation of mobile technology involving proprietary network hardware, with disaggregated approaches now beginning to make headway.
During Mobile World Live’s inaugural Unwrapped event, Kohli noted it had taken time for open RAN vendors to begin to gain traction in a market with long-established business models.
He explained it took Mavenir around seven years to get to where it is today, but added future networks were now on the brink of fully employing “software and disaggregated stacks”.
Kohli highlighted funding as another key challenge for any open RAN player, noting Mavenir’s ambition to establish itself as a systems integrator brought a different set of capital requirements, particularly as it finds itself increasingly involved in the hardware sector.
He explained Mavenir is developing some hardware itself to get round supply-chain issues caused by a changing geopolitical landscape, given many of the companies which actually make the equipment are based in China.
The company has spent three years setting up a “team which can design and build radios”.
“In that sense that has been a barrier”, Kohli said, explaining if more companies were producing key hardware elements “we would have been able to address the market much faster.
Kohli also discussed a global skills shortage, and offered his views on the approach infrastructure companies and network operators should take to up their slice of the revenue generated by growing data traffic.
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