Open RAN has delivered the economic, operational and diversification results for those that have managed to introduce it with high levels of automation and software management across testing, planning, deploying, operating and assuring. These have been mainly greenfield rollouts, unencumbered by existing practices and organization structures.
Open RAN failing to realize its network diversity promise at meaningful scale is not for lack of investment, effort and capable tech. Over several years, it moved swiftly from concept to availability, buoyed by standards, alliances and a range of vendors delivering highly performant solutions.
The existing operator community has largely signaled that it prefers continuity, predictability, and operational certainty across established supply chains, processes, and assurance models.
That doesn’t mean Open RAN slowly withers.
Instead, it forces greater understanding of its unique potential to unlock new operational realities for a range of network use cases that are growing in importance. We are at peak macro but just starting with true indoor coverage, satellite, seamless Wi-Fi and the integration of all into hybrid coverage. This demands the technical hurdles that stand in the new pathways to Open RAN success be quickly conquered.
Integration efforts like those led by Digital Catapult are answering the call to accelerate these efforts. Its SONIC Labs is providing an independent Open Test and Integration Center (OTIC), where multi-vendor Open RAN and private network systems are being tested, hardened and validated before reaching the market. OTICs can assess, certify and badge products and solutions to commercially deployable quality standards.
SONIC Labs is stripping away hype and focusing on the hard work of discovering limits of real systems and unique approaches that can deliver value.
The new definition of success? Open RAN systems that are simpler to operate, deployments that are repeatable, integrations that are predictable and outcomes that would not otherwise exist.
On a recent episode of Zero-Touch Live, Digital Catapult ecosystem engagement manager Paul Rhodes and product VP Alex Smith from private networks builder Antevia Networks revealed progress the lab is making in advancing efforts.
What happens when compliance ≠ success
Open RAN stakeholders learned the hard way that diligently standardizing and adhering to specs didn’t result in foolproof interoperability.
Two vendors could implement the same O-RAN standard yet still pursue varying choices across optional paths, features and assumptions. Compliancy on paper didn’t mean these systems would play nice in the field.
The gaps are seen in the ways components interpret control signals, how management platforms expect data to be structured, how alarms are triggered or maybe how faults are handled. There’s no single technical failure. Rather, a chain of operational friction emerges, ultimately making systems fragile and unpredictable.
This is where SONIC Labs’ role as an engine of system maturity first became clear.
The important and necessary work behind integration
When systems are forced to operate together, integration stops being a late-stage checklist item and becomes the primary discipline.
At SONIC Labs, progress comes from repeatedly confronting real system behavior and removing uncertainty one interaction at a time, as vendors are held accountable to how the full system performs.
This surfaces some technical, but mainly operational, challenges that standards alone unintentionally conceal. Things like mismatched assumptions about workflows, unclear ownership when failures occur and support models that break down once multiple vendors become involved. In many cases, the friction is as much human as it is technical.
The neutral lab environment was the breakthrough that made it possible to address these issues without pushing risk onto operators or customers. When problems were discovered, they could be isolated, understood and resolved before they appeared in production networks. This work hardened interfaces, expectations, processes and working relationships across the ecosystem.
SONIC Labs is quietly creating a different measure of Open RAN readiness where success is defined by whether the system can be deployed, operated and supported in a predictable way.
Importantly, SONIC Labs is also aligning incentives across the ecosystem with regulators, vendors, system integrators and channel partners all embedded in the process. Each has a shared interest in making the outcomes usable, scalable and commercially viable, allowing learning to translate into deployment.
A case study: Antevia Networks closes integration gaps
Alex Smith at Antevia Networks knew its radios and software worked. What it needed to better understand was what problems emerged when its system had to operate with other vendor components and still be expected to behave as a single, dependable platform.
The biggest challenge uncovered was the integration gaps created by different interpretations of the same O-RAN specifications. SONIC Labs gave Antevia a place to expose and resolve those issues before they reached the field. Instead of debugging in front of customers, they could identify mismatches, align behaviors and harden reference designs. Over time, this work underpinned and validated a valuable system that could be deployed the same way, every time.
The development had direct business implications, allowing Antevia to move away from bespoke engineering projects and toward a channel-driven model built on repeatability. Channel partners could deploy the same architecture across multiple sites with confidence that the system would behave as expected, rather than starting from scratch for each customer.
At Bath Rugby Club, that repeatability translated into a full private 5G network installed and operational in a single morning, supporting both fan services and safety communications on match day.
It’s just one example of what happens when integration stops being a defensive exercise and becomes the mechanism through which new markets, operating models and deployment economics are redefined.
Lab revelations happening at ecosystem scale
Across cohorts and vendors, Digital Catapult has seen the same pattern repeat whereby once systems are forced to behave together, the real constraints are revealed to be operational, organizational and commercial in nature.
Paul Rhodes describes this as a shift from solving interface problems to solving human ones.
Vendors arrive technically capable, but misaligned in how they support, update, troubleshoot and assume responsibility once something breaks. SONIC Labs changes that dynamic by creating a shared space where integration issues surface early, accountability is clarified and reference behaviors are established before commercial deployment.
Over time, this work reshapes how ecosystems function by aligning vendors, channels, regulators and system builders around what it actually takes to deploy and operate multi-vendor networks with confidence.
The deeper role of the lab has become defining what “working” must mean in practice. This role takes on further weight given that the Lab sits inside a deliberate UK mechanism that pairs public funding with real participant commitment that gives vendors and partners more skin in the game. The insights coming out of SONIC Labs inform regulators and policymakers about what is realistically deployable, helping shape the next phase of network policy and spectrum strategy.
Open RAN’s next success milestone will not be reached by replacing what already works but by extending what is possible within the realities operators and enterprises face every day.
SONIC Labs shows what that looks like in practice with acknowledgement of market realities and in a repeatable way.
This is how we turn uncertainty into understanding and ultimately, deployable systems. The new success paths in Open RAN are being built one hardened interaction at a time.
Mention Geoff Hollingworth, Paul Rhodes and Alex Smith in the comments to ask a question or start a conversation.
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