Pentagon needs further industry collaboration on O-RAN development for 5G interoperability 

US Marines with Tactical Training and Exercise Control Group (TTECG), familiarize themselves with 5G-enabled devices at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), Twentynine Palms, Aug 16, 2022. (US Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Isaiah Brummett)

WASHINGTON  — The Department of Defense needs industry partners to become more involved in the process of making open radio access network (O-RAN) capabilities a reality, Pentagon leaders and warfighters said Thursday. 

O-RAN architectures allow users to mix and match different hardware and software components from various vendors when creating 5G networks. The goal is to provide more flexibility, cost efficiency and seamless interoperability, all while ensuring the network is as secure as possible. O-RAN has been a hot topic within 5G circles in recent years, but official direction on the principle wasn’t released until last October in the DoD’s most recent 5G guidance. 

Now the Pentagon wants more help from industry to make O-RAN become a reality at a faster pace, Director of the DoD CIO’s 5G Cross Function Team Juan Ramírez said during a Potomac Officer’s Club event today. 

“We’ve actually developed an open RAN strategy that, God willing, we get our money and we don’t get cut, we will actually start to see more deployment of open RAN. Yes, the department has been at the forefront of it, but we can’t be the only ones,” Ramírez said. 

“This is something that we are working with industry on, and we are getting support from industry, but we want to see it push faster. From that perspective, I would say the DoD is leading it [O-RAN], but it shouldn’t be the only one. We’re a small player when we look at the overall amount of money that is out there for network modernization.” 

When asked during a panel what needed to change to make 5G more applicable for military use, Johnson Wu, the commercial and technical lead of the Defense Innovation Unit’s cyber and telecom portfolio, replied “cross vendor interoperability.”

“We are still doubtful whether all this cycling stuff and 5G relays are actually interoperable,” he added. 

Coming from experience in the tactical domain, Zachary Taylor, senior communications officer in the Army’s special operations 75th Ranger Regiment, admitted that he tends to be skeptical of 5G capabilities because of their lack of interoperability and the lack of education on how they can become interoperable. If industry learns how to work together to be able to plug one device from one vendor into another device from another and teaches the warfighters how the process works, he said, the possibilities of 5G are more promising.

“It is not a silver bullet, right? It doesn’t solve everything,” Taylor said of 5G. “What I need industry to do is work with other industry partners and be willing to take that critical feedback from the warfighter.  

“Most of the warfighters don’t understand how to implement some of these different technologies. So what we need from industry is an education piece. We’re not subject matter experts. There’s a lot of technology. The rapid evolution of technology is just going to outpace our knowledge.” 

Capt. Lucas Vancina, 5G technical lead at the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity, said the most helpful component of 5G is when it can operate in an O-RAN fashion. 

“Definitely the extensibility of the open architecture aspect is probably the biggest advantage from my perspective, like the backwards compatibility,” Vancina said, explaining the capability of a 5G network component being able to work with a legacy system. “It can be both backwards compatible using the non-3GPP inner working functions [which are responsible for connecting networks like Wi-Fi, fixed-line and code division multiple access to 5G networks] and but also having that built in capability and plan roadmap for future use cases like 6G, is one of the biggest things.”