Webinar: Fierce Networks chats with Neil Coleman about new Open RAN report

Welcome back. For this next session, I'd like to welcome Fierce Networks' Mitch Wagner as he moderates a fireside chat with Rima Eontel from Red Hat and Neil Coleman from Amdocs as they discuss creating new telco opportunities in the cloud with Open Ramp. Before we start, please allow me to thank Amdocs and Red Hat for their support of this session. And just to remind you all to make sure you're submitting your questions to the speakers in the q and a tab at the top of your screen. Mitch, over to you. Thank you, Ollie. So and thank you to all of you for joining us today, and it is a hot one. I'm in San Diego County, California, just east of the city where it was a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. That's more than forty degrees Celsius, and it's supposed to get almost that hot later today. So I'm very glad to be indoors in air conditioning and talking about Open RAN with all of you. And the weather isn't the only thing that's hot today. We've also got a hot session for you starting right now on creating new telco opportunities in the cloud with Open RAN. We are joined by Rima Inotel, is Red Hat's chief telco architect. She's been working with telcos and partners in their network transformation journey. She joined Red Hat ten years ago and previously spent fourteen years at Verizon working on next generation network initiatives and helping to pioneer Verizon's first step in their first steps in their transition from legacy networks to the software defined cloud infrastructure. Our other speaker is Neil Coleman, product line product line management lead at Amdocs. We heard from him earlier today, and we're happy to have him back. Neil is the product line manager for Amdocs Open RAN software automation. He has more than twenty years of telecom software experience in product management and marketing roles at Amdocs, Actix, IBM, and MicroMuse. Welcome to you both and welcome back. I'm going to start the first question with Rima. Open RAN has been talked about for a very long time. Are we seeing it gaining momentum now? If so, why? We are definitely seeing it moving forward. I think it's because the standards are finally getting finalized and more clear. So it's easier to deploy something that would confirm to the standards. There's also been several years of lab experiments that we've seen service providers conduct over and over again, seen, you know, gauging the level of maturity. And I think they're finally seeing it getting closer to what they expect compared to what they already have as part of their legacy deployments. So they're seeing on par performance, reliability, scale, etcetera. So they are more comfortable in putting it in their networks. They're also getting a lot more comfortable with this whole idea of software defined networks, how you operate them, how you test them. So that's another aspect of comfortability. They've been training their people. And yeah, so we've seen a lot more concrete steps toward production deployments, not just, you know, like, let's kick the tires on it. And we've seen it in many different regions as well. So it's not just one region that finally decided, okay, we are ready. And one more thing is that we've seen governments getting behind the whole idea of open RAN, and some of the governments are putting actual money behind it. So that's another incentive for the service providers to act. Very good. Neil, what are you seeing in the market in terms of momentum these days? No, I think, yeah, I think Rima kind of hit the nail on the head there. I think if you look at where the industry's been and you know, you look at I think TIP was traced in twenty sixteen and the Open RAN Alliance in twenty eighteen. So you know, it's now approaching a kind of a decade of people working on Open RAN itself. And I think what that has done is, you know, it's that gradual building out of confidence, building momentum around the technologies. But I kind of also think there's there's a nice alignment between the kind of economic necessity that's going on within mobile networks at the moment. Think I think all, you know, stating the obvious, all operators want cheaper, more flexible networks. And I think the industry's decided that the open RAN approach is the best way of getting there, like making sure the virtualization gets done right, making sure that there's a strong push around the kind of standardised interfaces. And I think it's a technology whose time has come and, you know, is lined up with what where operators are trying to go. I think certainly in terms of the extra facets to it, which are quite interesting, and I think what we're seeing is a kind of a stronger adoption of the kind of open source technologies, obviously, Red Hat being on the call as well. But I think it allows operators to tap into the innovation that's going on in that space. That's also enabled by the kind of these open networks. I think finally, there's definitely an appetite for greater supplier choice. And that includes things that kind of obviously the CAS layer, the hardware and software components, but also in the services space around systems integration. So I think there's a real kind of alignment of operator needs and the technology being ready. Yeah, that's a great answer. You've really, both of you have really given us an overview on what the rest of this, session is gonna be about. I I know from from our perspective on our research, some of the milestones we're seeing have been AT and T with a fourteen billion dollar open ran initiative. Vodafone Group is in Europe is planning on moving thirty percent of its base stations to open RAN by two thousand and thirty. Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefonica, all all working on open RAN. And I think the success of initiatives like Japan's Rakuten are providing much needed reference point. You know, once somebody has succeeded with it, everybody else wants to succeed. So, Neil, we're gonna keep the spotlight on you for our next question. What are some of the opportunities and benefits that carriers can expect to get from implementing Open RAN? Well, mean, think we can approach it on kind of on kind of many angles. Think I'll take it to somewhere that's kind of closer to my heart, which is around the automation side. I think one of the things this move to standards based interfaces and standards based components means it's much easier to start to layer in the automation that is required to kind of make a lot of these business cases work. So speaking as a part of the Amdocs organization that used to look after the old self optimizing network capabilities, we were often stuck trying to integrate with monolithic proprietary vendors where they'd opened up certain interfaces but restrict the data. And it really kind of put a cap on how much automation could be achieved in the network itself. Now with OpenRM, with the defined interfaces like the o one, o two and r one, there's a much, much more easier way of getting data out of the networks and making changes, making changes back in. And I think we touched upon it a little bit earlier, some of the opportunities around OpenRun are very much obviously from a business side launching new services but a lot of it is about how operators can change their operational processes and the way they work with their networks in a way that brings them kind of up to date and allows them to tap into all the great new technology that's coming out of the open source community. Okay. Great. Rima, same question to you. Opportunities and benefits from implementing open RAN. And by the way, I understand I'm having some audio crackling, so we're gonna make sure to see if we can fix that in real time here. And thank you for your patience, everyone. So, well, main benefit of separation between your hardware and your software layer is, of course, how much flexibility you're putting into your network to introduce new things, to try out new things in a fairly easy manner, right? So it's not as big of investment every time you want to try a new use case, a new service. You have the pool of resources essentially, that's how the cloud works. And with that pool of resources, you can dedicate part of it to trying something new. If it doesn't work, it's very easy to refocus and, you know, you haven't put appliances in your network that are holding you back because, you know, it's very expensive to rip them out. So that's one of the opportunities. Also, it allows you because of the environment, which is the same environment that many other industries are using and testing in and contributing to, it gives you an opportunity to borrow from the experiences of those other industries and also opening up a space for new types of developers and for new type of innovation from companies that previously would not have even thought about going into telecom networks. And that basically gives you an opportunity to innovate. As a disclaimer, we are not seeing too much of it yet, unfortunately, because telcos are very regulated. It's a very regulated environment. They're always afraid of any potential detrimental effect on the service quality or even, you know, a failure in the network. So every time they put something new in, they're very cautious, understandably. And that's one of the barriers they have to sort of overcome. They have to find ways of balancing that innovation and fear of failure in the network. So one of the things we're seeing is some of the service providers are looking at public clouds as one of the places where they can play like a sandbox, right, for the new services. And it basically gives them that environment where they can count on the underlying infrastructure most of the time without making a huge commitment. So those are some of the opportunities that we are seeing the service providers are looking at and exploring to innovate their services. Great, great. So that kind of leads to the next question, which again, we're going to direct back to Rima. What are some of the challenges that operators are seeing in adopting Open RAN? And how can operators overcome those challenges? Well, one of the challenges is what's supposed to be so great about OpenRAN and that's how disaggregated it is. It makes operating it a lot more complex. Interoperability is a huge concern. So the idea of mixing and matching components from different vendors, even though the interface is getting more standardized day by day, there's still disconnect. We are not seeing too much of, for instance, somebody deploying VDU from one vendor and VCU from a different vendor. We're still seeing that usually coming, you know, as a bundle. Even though it's a disaggregated bundle, the interface between them is open, but you don't want to worry about that interoperability complexity in your network. But we are seeing a lot of RUs from one vendors and everything else from somebody else. So that's definitely happening. So front haul is not necessarily open front haul yet. In some cases it is, in some cases it's like, questionable, if you will. But it's definitely trending towards that. Another complexity, and that's something that I think Neil touched on is automation. There's so many moving pieces that you it gives you an opportunity to automate it, but it's also making it challenging. Right? How do you find that fine balance of not over engineering your network, but making it just flexible enough that it gives you the, you know, the flexibility that you need without building up the complexity that you cannot manage. The other challenges are sometimes Well, it's a separate area. It's more in the business aspect of it than technology. Challenge is they haven't really found what we used to call killer app. So how do you monetize? You're putting in a big investment and we already saw a huge investment into five gs generally, even like legacy based five gs. So what motivates you to move towards open RAN if you don't have that business need necessarily? So we do see some service providers saying, I already deployed my five gs with appliances. It works great. I don't see a need to move to any other model. So that also happens. So very different types of challenges, right, between technology, business and internal processes as well. Right? In some places, they just don't have enough people to adapt to something so new, like they don't have the resources to retrain the whole workforce. So they're taking it a bit slow. Interesting. I'm gonna I'm gonna put you on the spot here and ask you to improvise and think on your feet, Reyma. What do you think will be the business case, that killer app that emerges? Any thoughts there at all? I am thinking maybe it's going to be six gs, quite frankly, because everything else has already been tried. Right? And the hope was that B2B was going to be big. Smart cities, smart manufacturing, smart agriculture. The latter two, we are seeing more of private five gs solutions fit in those use cases and private five g can be open RAN based, but it doesn't have to be. It's actually better to bundle things because then it's gonna be cheaper. So, yeah, maybe six gs. Alright. Okay. Neil, I'll go over to you. Challenges in adopting Open RAN. Can operators overcome those challenges? That's a good I did like that question on kind of what is the killer business case. I think operators are very much in that kind of next g cycle where that the whole structure of the the industry, both the NEPS and the operators, kind of work in lockstep. You know, the standards are created, the capabilities of that technology get hyped, the operators invest and then, you know, a substantial amount of money in the next technology and then spend ten years trying to pay it back. So I think having the capital G as the business case is I think is a model that served the industry really well. And I think to a certain extent with OpenRun, the kind of move to six gs will kind of tip that over with the kind of move to virtualization and more kind of cloud based services. But I actually think the the killer app for Open RAN is that there isn't a killer app. And the sense that operators will have a you know, the operators, I think, get a very rough, kind of press in terms of their ability to innovate. But as Rima pointed out, they're very, very constrained both by the technology that's being operated by the NEPS, you know, offered you know, provided by the NEPS by the standards and by by regulation. And I think the innovation that Open RAN brings is if done correctly, it means you've got freedom to innovate and freedom to freedom to fail. And I think that's what's really been holding operators back, that they have to have this perfect business case, then make the investment, and then pay that investment back. Whereas I think we're now approaching a time where you need lots of kind of micro segmented business cases, each with their own value proposition and a short period of ROI, short enough that the operators can see to see to invest. So that so I think that's a that's kind of an interesting shift that's going on. In terms of the challenges, I mean, think Rima hit a lot of them very, very well. I think what we're seeing is that, like, for the first time, a lot of operators are are having to become kind of systems integrators, and it's a little bit of a space that they don't feel kind of entirely comfortable with, but they are getting much more comfortable. So, you know, how do they set up the labs? How do they, you know, do all the kind of pre integration testing? How do they deploy it? How do they move through these kind of new CICD processes and to fundamentally go from a kind of monolithic packaged network into something that's much more fragmented. So you know, our work with operators a lot at the moment is around helping them put these processes and supporting them putting those types of types of processes in. So it's really kind of taken those first steps into becoming a much more dynamic software orientated organization rather than a, you know, a vendor takes vendor equipment, puts vendor equipment into the network type model. Yeah. Very, very interesting. I think our own research is showing that some of the obstacles we're seeing is security, multi vendor involvement makes for a larger attack surface, accountability, multi vendor involvement leads to finger pointing, interoperability kind of obvious there, issues with network monitoring and management. As far as the business case, this is just my theory here, but I think it's going to be Internet of Things. It's going to be smart factories, smart agriculture, healthcare, connected cars, self driving cars. All of that is going to require multiple orders of magnitude more connectivity than we have now. An industry leader some years ago, think it might have been John Chambers and CEO of Cisco was saying that history will look back at the time until now as the time before the Internet started. And I really like that. I think that's the vision here. Anyway, let's we also got a really good question here from in the q and a section, but I'm gonna hold off on that and leave people hanging and create some success suspense rather. Instead, I want to ask if it's about the question of brownfield versus greenfield. Operators already have a large infrastructure, obviously. Is it more difficult to deploy open RAN in brownfield than in greenfield? And what should operators be thinking and doing about that? This one's for Neil again. Yeah. I mean, it's a really good question. I think everyone wants to be in a greenfield environment. So I think everyone wants a of slate, you know, a new architecture you can drop, you know, you can do your vendor selection and you can, I think almost more importantly, you can define all of your systems and processes in a way that, you know, that only has to work with the new, items that you're you're deploying in? I mean, that's not without challenges. You know, all of the greenfields that have gone to date have had technology problems. They've, you know, had to roll their own systems integration. But, fundamentally, they could start afresh and and approach problems, you know, approach problems without kind of constraints. I think, I think the brownfield challenges is that, you know, there's a term in the tech industry called technical debt. There's a there's a substantial technical debt that operators have in the brownfield space. But it's a good technical debt. I mean, you know, the networks do do work very, very well. And it's really a challenge in brownfield about how do you effectively rebuild a plane while it's in flight. So how do you get this new technology into the networks in a way that doesn't disrupt your existing technology stack, but also doesn't disrupt your processes. And I think that's why you see a lot of operators having highly localized, you know, RAN deployments, maybe open RAN deployments in underserved areas, or you have, operators like AT and T who have kind of taken the approach of trying to evolve with Ericsson, so co evolve into a open RAN from traditional to open RAN to co evolve together hand in hand and solve the problems all in one. I think from our perspective, I think the thing that kind of strikes us and speaking from kind of the operational side is kind of how do you adapt these older effective operational processes to this new more dynamic world. And it's how operators can create an operational bridge that enables them to kind of effectively still manage an old network and automate that whilst bringing in the new components. And we know some operators are making doing it as kind of a virtual greenfield and just starting afresh, but I think a lot more operators want to bring their operational processes and modernize them as they go along. Yeah, that's kind of a traditional way of doing any kind of brownfield deployment is basically don't. When you have new business, use the new technology. Remo, what are you seeing? Brownfield versus greenfield? Greenfield all the way for sure. But it's very difficult. Very few players can afford that. Plus you only Greenfield the very first moment you deploy. Next iteration, and you're already brownfield. And we've seen that happen to some newcomers. Google comes to mind with the fiber when they went basically, oh, we'll show you, you're doing everything wrong. And so they deployed and then they discovered, Yeah, the first time you're doing it, it's okay. But any next generation, anything, you can just throw out what you already put in the network. You have to work with it and you have to operate it together. It's not like pure software business where, you know, you push an update and it just runs. No, it doesn't work like that. You have a whole bunch of hardware in your network that you have to deal with. So even though greenfield is ideal, potentially, are not going to be a greenfield for very long at all. So you have to plan for being a brownfield when you're still just starting out. You have to plan for what am I going to do when I have to do updates, upgrades, my day two operations, right? When next generation of whatever is going to come along. Is it just a software upgrade? Does it require a hardware upgrade? You have to think through all of that. And I train my people once. How complicated is it going to be to retrain them when something new is being introduced? And you don't want to be a one trick pony necessarily. You want to be adding new services. That's the whole point of having the network. Otherwise, you deteriorate to that original, right, dump pipe scenario that every telco is trying to avoid. So how do I handle that, right? When I already have other services running in the network, how do I not step on them? How do I not affect those services performance when I introduce something new without also having to grow the network beyond my ability to either manage it or my ability to afford it. So, yeah, Greenfield is like this utopia, but you have to live in the real world. Yeah, I think we could talk about that for hours, but we do not have hours. So let's move on. Rima, next question starts with you. Operators can implement Open RAN in the public cloud or in the private cloud. What are you seeing out there for best practices? Definitely on prem is the preferred way of doing it. Even the ones who potentially start out in the public cloud quickly realize that the costs might not be what they were expecting. And also the underlying capabilities, you're constrained with underlying capabilities of the public cloud that you select. And unless, you know, partner in the public cloud is willing to work with you and introduce potentially new capabilities, which might be very costly for them, for, you know, very small segment of the customers, you might not be able to achieve what your competition can achieve by deploying on prem and having full control of the full stack. Also security concerns, of course, in the public cloud, you can sort of fence it off. And that's what happens when you see telcos deploying in the public cloud. But having disconnected environments on prem, you still cannot beat that for security. Operational abilities in the public cloud. When they decide to upgrade the public cloud, they just upgrade it. Are you prepared operationally to handle that? Our most of our customers are not, you know, adapting the newest releases or anything that's deployed. Right? They always have that period of waiting for the to make sure that it's mature enough, that nothing like really critical pops up. In the public cloud, you might not have that opportunity. You might be faced with the fact that they're rolling out upgrade and they're rolling it out everywhere. Deal with it. Not an easy thing to do. Performance, latency in the public cloud. Something that you can control when you are fully in control of your on prem, you might not have ability to control that in the public cloud. So like I mentioned earlier, public cloud might be a great place as a sandbox to try out new services, even, you know, doing some friendlies type of things. So you have real customers, but the customers know that it's just a trial and they're not going to judge you too harshly. You can afford failure. You can afford outages. Once you roll it out, you know, to all your customers, you might not want to have that risk. So, yeah, that's definitely an opportunity for service providers to have that relationship with public clouds, but we're still seeing priority. And we're also seeing a lot of the deployments that went into the cloud coming back, getting repatriated on prem because of some of the things I mentioned. One thing we do see a lot in the public cloud is actual operational tools. They are IT workloads that they work really well in the public cloud environment, unlike the networking, you know, networking applications necessarily. That is an extremely interesting answer. We've been hearing, I think for ten or twenty years now about how public cloud is great and everybody's just move everything there. Don't worry about running your own data centers, economies of scale, security specialists. And now the reality seems to be the opposite in many cases. Very, very interesting. Neil, public cloud versus private cloud. What are you seeing? Yeah. I think I'll pick up on kind of two points that Ruma raised. Think fundamentally it's right that it's going to be kind of private cloud in the short term for the critical network infrastructure. And in a way the kind of hype around, like you said, put it all on the cloud, we've got the expertise, is is kind of now meeting its kind of first mission critical industry. And you can see where some of that, I guess, build it build it quickly, break it quickly mentality just just doesn't kind of doesn't hold old house. So I think that's certainly what we're seeing as well. And I think agreed on the operational side. So, you know, a lot of our work over in the operational side has moved to kind of some of it on prem, some of it public clouds because the workloads can run offline. So you can have you know, it's it's not important if a, you know, a machine learning algorithm that you're running to kind of analyze some data about how more effectively you can save energy, it doesn't matter if that that gets delayed by a minute or two minutes in terms of its in terms of its data collection. So I guess what you were seeing is this kind of tearing of mission criticality and how close you bring it to the the actual, you know, the the kind of access network infrastructure infrastructure itself. But but certainly all of our operator customers have been on that journey of migrating a lot of their operational stuff over to over to public cloud. So That's pretty interesting. So basically, the the the the the less mission critical it is, the more likely it is to go to public cloud. I think yeah. I think I think that's a hundred percent. I think I mean, obviously, still data privacy and GDPR and all of those type of concerns, might bring you private, but the compute infrastructure can be, you know, is less mission critical, so it can be deployed kind of anywhere. So emergency services on private cloud, but Pokemon GO can go to public cloud. Exactly. I'm gonna get hate mails. There's one other thing. If you put something, if you have both, if you have a hybrid type of deployment, the way you manage something in the private and in the public cloud, it adds complexity, right? So unless you go with a hybrid solution, like for instance, what we offer with OpenShift platform, you have to have operations trained on both types of environment. And that's obviously complexity and, you know, like monitoring tools and deployment tools and all of that. You might have duplication. Once again, complexity, right? So that's another aspect of having, if you have both. Great, great. So I'm going to go back to Neil for the next question. To implement Open RAN, do operators need new skills and training? Is there a big cultural shift? What are you seeing? Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, fundamentally, it's a it's a kind of it's a step change in technology. I know that kind of VRAN is is obviously kind of led the way slightly, but I think there's definitely a cultural shift that needs to to to go on. I think there's a certain extent where the challenger network equipment providers always lament the culture that currently sits within an operator. They're not dynamic enough, they don't understand the new technologies. But I think fundamentally operators are highly intelligent people that are doing very challenging jobs managing their traditional networks. I think the the kind of my belief is that when the kind of fragmentation of the network infrastructure happens, that the operators and the and the people that work within operators will be freed or much more freed of their constraints and allowed to kind of change their culture. So I guess what I'm saying is their culture, it's not a it's a culture that's effectively been defined by the environment they need to work in versus a culture that they have itself created, that makes sense. So so I think there definitely needs to be upskilling and and training on these new these new pieces of infrastructure. But I I think that happens naturally as a result to the change in these new architectures rather than something that needs to be forced. That makes sense. So it sounds like you're saying it's kind of gonna be a virtuous cycle. Yeah. Yes. I think they've been they've been locked in a they've been locked in a in a certain cycle at the moment where they, effectively don't have the keys to their infrastructure to a certain extent. They've got proprietary equipment quite heavily bolted down and all of their kind of approach and ways of working are dictated by that And I think when the infrastructure opens up, when the interfaces open up, then I think, you know, having people move into the open RAN environment and, you know, be comfortable with that CICD workflows, be comfortable with the kind of micro service based automation, I think you'll see that culture shift very, very quickly. So they've been they've been working in a locked room all this time. And when you open the doors and knock down the walls, you don't have to worry about people. You definitely have to worry about people, but I think you've given the right environment and I think people can change much more quickly than people appreciate. Interesting. Interesting. Reema, what are you seeing as far as skills training and cultural shift required for open RAN? Well, as somebody who started working on Signaling System seven for those dinosaurs who remember that, I've seen a lot of changes and I know that telcos can definitely adapt. We went from SS7 to IP based networks And then we went from the traditional legacy monolithic infrastructure to SDN and cloud, etcetera. So definitely doable. It does require training and it does require being mindful about the change and giving people opportunity to learn. So you can create like little islands of people working on something new, but then those islands have to spread out. The learnings have to be shared between different teams. And one crucial place where it needs to go for sure is operations. Because if operations people cannot operate your network, no matter how new, shiny, and brilliant it is, you're not gonna get anywhere. Right? And if the network operations, at least I know at Verizon, as I said, we cannot run this, it was never getting deployed. So you definitely need to be mindful of that. But right now there's a lot more opportunity to learn on the job and, you know, just different ways of learning that you can tailor to different types of people to make it interesting or easier for them. So I definitely believe it does require a cultural shift, understanding how things work in this world of Open RAN, especially with a lot of open source software baked into the solutions, because we are seeing still, not even in service providers, but even in the traditional vendors who are supplying the new equipment, they're not contributing back to open source. They might be consuming it, but not necessarily participating in the community. Some of them actually forbidden. The developers themselves are forbidden by their contracts to contribute to open source community. And that definitely puts that barrier and breaks that social contract, if you will, even where the community works together to improve something. Open RAN is possible because there's a community behind it, because there are new types of companies participating and contributing. So if somebody just consumes it and doesn't give back in terms of use cases of testing or just, you know, understanding of the environment that these new applications are going to end up in. If they don't do that, then it's not going to be as good as it could be otherwise. So we've seen some service providers who are very active in open source communities and kudos to them. But it should be ubiquitous for it to be really, really successful. And people need to understand how it works. Yeah. So we've only got a few minutes left and I want to take time for a couple of questions here. One of them is just on there's three hundred players in the Open RAN Alliance, three hundred vendors. How can they all compete and survive commercially? And also can an operator pick intelligently from three hundred potential providers, even selecting from ten can be overwhelming. So I'm gonna let's start with Rima again on this one. They're not gonna all survive. I'm sorry. They're gonna be brought up. They're gonna be merging. We've seen that every time something new pops up, right? New, very vibrant ecosystem emerges, but then they do tend to sort of clump together and the best ones hopefully will survive. How do service providers navigate it? By participating, right? By seeing what all these new players have to offer and playing around with it in their labs, etcetera, and not being afraid to invest in those new players because that's often what happens. Anybody new, like you want a backing from your traditional vendor that you are comfortable with. So they need to be able to step outside of their comfort box. Okay, Neil, we've got a minute and a half. No pressure. How can they compete? Three hundred vendors? Well, I think, think to Ruby's point, I don't think they all they all will compete. I think the most important thing about it is that they are competing, and that it's very important the, even if the kind of the infrastructure ball end up boiling down to five or six or seven that are more significant players, it's very important that the interfaces remain open and the ability to compete exists because without that without that, then we go back to the world of proprietary interfaces, which I think no one I don't think anyone wants. I think the interesting part very quickly on that kind of competition. So in a lot of the projects that we're involved in, we work with companies which traditionally have been our competitors, but we end up cooperating them with them because you can actually see there's a bigger pie to be had by banding together. So I think what you'll see is a lot more cooperation where and where you don't have to where there are less defined winners and losers. And I think that's kind of one of the most exciting things about Open RAN for me. Okay, perfect timing. Just enough time to say goodbye to everybody. And thank you very much for participating in this very interesting panel. And we have a report coming up on this. Go to a fierce dot network dot com and keep an eye out for that. It's gonna be in the next few days or next couple of weeks. Really, really interesting stuff. Thank you again. Have a good day and rest of your week. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much everyone. And of course, a big thank you to this session's partners for their support. Don't go anywhere as we will transfer you automatically to our next session. See you shortly.