Mavenir aims to disrupt telecom networks space, to strengthen 5G R&D

Mavenir, a cloud-native network software company aims to bring in innovation and disruption in the networks space dominated by Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei, and is planning to spend a part of recent $500 million investment in fifth generation or 5G research and development (R&) activities.

“We are enabling new players to enter the market traditionally controlled by three vendors, and bring innovation and disruption by widening the supply chain,” Pardeep Kohli, President & Chief Executive Officer, Mavenir told ETTelecom, adding that the merger of telecom and IT industry would completely change the landscape in the future.

The company with inherent strengths in the network software domain, has more than 500 patents, and invested in OpenRAN development, and aims to bring more 5G-centric applications affordably, with public and private cloud virtualisation is one of its key focus areas.

Open RAN or Open Radio Access Network is an intelligent Radio Access Network (RAN) integrated on general-purpose platforms with an open interface between software-defined functions.

Early this year, Koch Investments Group invested $500 million in Mavenir as a part of its strategy to take equity stake in innovative and disruptive companies that operate in industries with tailwinds.

Kohli said that the company plans to use the money ($500 million) to scale operations in line with customer footprints and portfolio expansion as well continue to invest in new areas through our R&D which has been their strength.

“Relating it to 5G adoption, this investment is enabling us to shape our products for different verticals with a focus on automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and various operational delivery models that are going to benefit our customers worldwide,” the top executive added.

London-based STL Partners estimates that the annual sales of OpenRAN active network elements including equipment and software would reach $12 billion, or 21% of all active RAN capex excluding passive infrastructure by 2026.

OpenRAN or open architecture-based approach is seeing much momentum in the telecom sector particularly in developing economies and price-sensitive markets such as India with biggies such as Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are aggressively propelling the initiative.

The UK-based Vodafone group which operates in India as Vodafone Idea or Vi, in partnership with Mumbai-based Idea Cellular, is a part of O-RAN Alliance alongside AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo and Orange, formed in 2018.

“Traditional RAN with closed and proprietary interfaces are difficult to scale, and less efficient to automate. This leads to a diminishing supplier ecosystem, reduced price competition and slow innovation,” the top executive said.

The OpenRAN major said that it has been taking available technologies to the radio market, and disaggregate and virtualise onto hyperscale cloud platforms for a comparatively faster time to market, and making OpenRAN a more inclusive ecosystem which has been a traditionally closed system.

Kohli, however, expects limited 5G rollouts to start towards early 2022 in India.

“5G is critical to India’s digital transformation thrust as it will empower communication service providers (CSPs) to move beyond a subscriber-driven business model and re-invent themselves as digital service providers (DSPs) for driving innovation, safety and productivity across industries and enterprises to drive Industry 4.0 use cases,” the top executive added.