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Telecom Infra Project (TIP) executive director Kristian Toivo and Rakuten Symphony CMO Geoff Hollingworth are set to deliver opening keynote interviews at Mobile World Live’s upcoming Unwrapped: The 5G Evolution event, where they’ll discuss the shift to software-based, cloud-agnostic networks and the realities of deploying open and cloud-native RAN architectures. In this article, Geoff and Kristian share their perspective on what it will take to scale openness across networks and how collaboration is shaping the path forward.
Growing pains notwithstanding, open telco initiatives are hitting their stride.
Whether software-based, virtualized or disaggregated networks, the sustained pursuit of flexibility, cost savings and choice has yielded positive outcomes for telcos. Early efforts like Open RAN, open transport and open interfaces have proven disaggregated systems can work and achieve different economic outcomes, speed of execution and choice. Efforts must now shift to scaling open approaches across domains and networks.
What does this mean? We need to make the economic outcomes more repeatable in commercial deployments. Isolated projects and pilots need not apply.
While telcos have brought seemingly unlimited patience to pursuits, AI, automation and cloud-native architectures are creating an urgency that cannot be ignored given reliance on modular and interoperable systems.
Cost pressures and overall efficiency demands only intensify. Subscribers are paying a fraction of what they used to for connectivity while expecting flawless experiences. Advanced workloads are straining traditional infrastructure.
While open was once considered a nice-to-have, it is evident closed systems cannot evolve quickly enough with external progress to keep up with change. This shifts the need for interoperability and shared development to business necessities, not ideals.
The value case for open is well-documented. Safe to say, it has proven lower TCO, shortens innovation cycles and accelerates deployment velocity while keeping networks affordable and sustainable.
That’s when it works as intended. If traditional approaches are followed, it becomes more challenging for open to deliver on its promises.
Scale requires coordination between technical, organizational and commercial layers while eschewing traditional procurement models. This puts an overwhelming onus on collaboration as the most viable strategy for overcoming fragmentation. All while balancing innovation, stability and trust.
This is not telecom’s first technology revolution. When it moved from analog to digital or hardware to software, new operating models emerged. The same will happen as we scale openness.
Openness at scale will represent a systemic shift in how the industry collaborates. Operators and vendors have always worked together. How they collaborate needs to shift to become faster, more horizontal and centered on shared validation instead of paperwork and specification checklists.
This is already happening, including via initiatives supported by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), a global community of operators, vendors and integrators working together to validate and deploy open solutions across every layer of the network. TIP measures success, in part, by how quickly ideas can progress to interoperability and deployment.
The key to early momentum has been starting where real demand exists, not what tech happens to be new or available. Already, the hard work of defining use cases and performance goals grounded in commercial pain points like traffic growth and power efficiency are aligning partners around foundational capabilities like interfaces and data models. This coopetition dynamic, which still leaves room to differentiate around features and delivery, preserves commercial edge and differentiation while helping all stakeholders build faster.
As mentioned above, pouring over standards documents is not the modus operandi. Rather, collaboration is happening around test beds and field trials while operator validation helps convert engineering progress into market confidence.
The goal? End to end open architecture, not isolated open components. This is true for RAN, transport, core and access, where teams are encouraged to share insights instead of operating in silos. These efforts are iterative as a continuous cycle of deploy>measure>refine progresses efforts.
We continue to see evidence that vendors that open their architectures gain reach and trust through shared accountability.
The collaborative breakthroughs being advanced by TIP are already producing results with measurable progress across transport, content delivery and enterprise access.
Let’s explore a few of them.
Optical transport (Phoenix/400G pluggables). Collaboration in optical transport has quietly become one of the strongest proofs that openness can deliver results. By aligning operators and vendors around shared architectures for disaggregated optical systems, commercially deployable solutions like 400G pluggable modules have scaled capacity without full hardware replacement. These efforts support the bandwidth growth required for AI and distributed computing, showing us what happens when openness meets clear demand:
Content delivery optimization. We see a similar collaborative pattern in content delivery, where high volumes of short-form video and streaming traffic are pushing the limits of network performance. Rather than operate in isolation, operators and content providers are co-developing technical remedies to balance user experience against network efficiency. It’s a pragmatic shift that replaces negotiation with shared experimentation:
Open WiFi and access networks. At the access layer, open-source collaboration around Wi-Fi is showing how quickly openness can move from idea to global adoption. Community-built software stacks are letting service providers combine hardware from multiple vendors under a unified, cloud-based controller to cut cost while increasing flexibility. The success is already visible across multiple regions and use cases:
This collaborative mindset is also becoming more prevalent in mobile radio, with an increased focus on enabling third-party applications to run consistently across all vendors and generations of equipment.
Each of these examples underscores a common pattern: openness scales when collaboration starts with shared operator needs and is validated through live deployments for commercially proven outcomes. From optical transport to content delivery and access networks, the formula is to align on real demand, build together and then deploy fast enough to keep pace with change.
The next challenge? Applying those principles across the entire network stack to evolve openness from a deployment strategy to a programmable foundation for autonomous operations.
This shift is already underway as operators extend collaboration beyond components and interfaces to include orchestration layers and real-time intelligence. Within TIP, work is progressing toward end-to-end programmability across domains, uniting open and cloud-based RAN architectures, orchestration platforms and unified control layers to make networks programmable across both new and existing environments. Together, these efforts lay the groundwork for autonomy that spans the full stack.
Openness is becoming the operating model for modern networks. As collaboration matures into shared programmability and AI-driven orchestration, building together to move faster should remain the priority.
Let’s make open systems intelligent, autonomous and ready for whatever comes next.
Have a question for Geoff or Kristian? Mention them in the comments to start a conversation.
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