Ep. 39: TELUS CTO on Open RAN - Decision, Experience & Advice

TELUS will be the first operator to use Open RAN for not only new 5G deployment but also to replace the legacy 4G network. Although the Government mandate necessitated the replacement, it was still a bold decision. TELUS will also be a multi-vendor true Open RAN deployment, with radios, cloud platform, RAN software, servers, and processors, all coming from different vendors. It expects almost 50% of the network to be Open RAN by the end of 2025. In this episode, I talk to Nazim Benhadid, CTO of TELUS, on the factors that led to choosing Open RAN, their large-scale live network performance testing, the decision to use look-aside accelerator configuration, and being their own Systems Integrator, as well as his recommendations to the other brownfield operators looking to deploy Open RAN.