How do you prevent vendor lock-in in telecom infrastructure? There have been a lot of ideas in this space, because the problem is one that operators have complained about for decades. The latest notion is for governments to mandate vendor diversity or openness in some way. This isn’t the first time the issue has come up. Is the approach rumored to be a recommendation of a UK task force on the topic a different approach, is the problem space changing, or are we heading down a familiar rat hole?
Many in the industry will recall that AT&T, over a decade ago, broke network procurement into multiple functional areas, and then picked vendors for each area to encourage competitive interplay and reduce lock-in. They also tried to limit the number of functional areas vendors could bid in, and while that created some jockeying for a couple years, it really didn’t amount to much. The problem is that the key vendors in the networking space often have a better strategy than other vendors, and often their products are symbiotic between the “functional areas” that an operator could define.
Forced competition among key players is one way of eliminating lock-in, but it doesn’t impact a second problem operators face in equipment selection and deployment, which is loss of innovation. Everyone knows that incumbent vendors tend to take root on their current position and become trees, immobile except for some waving of product positioning branches. Operators trying to avoid lock-in and promote innovation have tried to use standards to create an interoperability framework that would let them pit new and innovative suppliers against incumbents.
The problem with this approach is that it requires the standards group to frame at least the high level of functionality and implementation, in order to define interfaces. Working to do that requires a good understanding of both current technology and technology trends, and that’s more likely to be found in the vendor community than among operators. Not only that, standards groups in the networking space have been moving slower and slower over time, and as a result operators find the market well ahead of the standards they’ve hoped would control it.
Then there’s vendor interference. Every network standards body I’ve been involved with has seen interference from the big vendors. In some cases, it’s just a matter of the vendors’ promoting a point of view that favors them, which is counterproductive to operator goals but not really bad form. Sometimes it’s active undermining of initiatives through less-than-honorable means. Big vendors can usually afford to deploy a large number of their employees to these groups, and pay them to make contributions. That means that even if their tactics were fully honorable, these vendors would likely dominate the groups’ activities.
The reason I’m going through all of this is that government mandates are not likely to address any of these problems. In fact, if there are specific rules that have to be followed, it’s hard not to see current interminable standards activities getting even more interminable, if that’s possible. We already have situations where people have retired from a standards effort before it finished its job, and we might see several generations of standards-writers passing the torch if we’re not careful. Governments rarely are.
The article I referenced at the opening of this blog objects mostly to the notion of assigning a quota to “competitive” suppliers, including open-model networking adherents. They’re not against the government encouraging broader participation, open-model contributions, or both. I have concerns about both the quotas and the encouragement.
Telcos have arguably screwed up their own standards efforts by failing to staff them with enough people and with people with skills in the emerging technology areas that would make an advance in network technology possible. They’ve also brought their own, historically glacial, pace to the process. I contend that governments are even less likely to staff projects with the right people or enough people, so how exactly could they encourage something? Would then even recognize “innovation” if it were to be presented? And if we think telcos are glacial, they’re supersonic aircraft in comparison to governments.
We keep missing a critical point here, the point that I believe is fundamental to the next advance in networking. That point is that network software is where network functionality will reside in the future. Hardware is just something to run the software on and provide it with adequate performance. The advantage of software-centricity is that nothing is set in stone, as it is with hardware interfaces. Not only can APIs be changed, they can be “adapted” to a related but slightly different form, expanded, and subjected to rapid development processes aimed at making major changes in a matter of weeks or days, not years or decades. Given that, there’s no reason not to presume that advanced network technology could be developed in an open forum, using fast-fail project approaches. Let the market pick what works best and mandate it.
O-RAN is about three years old, and it’s made significant progress in that time, because it’s an open-source software initiative. Even three years is a long time to get something done in the Internet age, but it sure beats the 3GPP decades-long generational evolution. We could make O-RAN better, too.
How? By making open network software work like the IETF works. Not inside the IETF, which has a bit too much of a traditional IP bias and is influenced too much by big router vendors, but separate from it and guided by a principle that says you can submit a proposed standard/specification only if you also submit an open reference implementation. The next-gen telco network would then be based on interfaces that were first open, and only then subject to proprietary enhancement.
Operators could still decide they wanted proprietary stuff, but I think most would say that they wanted major vendors to conform to the open specifications, even if they didn’t open their own implementations. I’m against having governments play a role in this process because I don’t think they’d have the skills to do it right.