A New ONF Spin-Out Could Transform Private 5G

I have to admit I was surprised when I read that the ONF was launching a private venture, Ananki, to bring its Aether 5G open-model network implementation to market. As you can see in the release, Ananki will target the “private 5G space” and will use the ONF’s Aether, SD-RAN, SD-Fabric and SD-Core technologies. The new company will be backed by venture funding, and it will apparently target the “machine to application” or IoT market for private 5G specifically.

I don’t know of another industry body like the ONF that has spun off a company to sell something based on its implementation. It would seem that a move like that could compromise the group’s vendor members and alter its mission, though the ONF says it won’t be doing anything different as a result of the spin-out. It certainly raises some interesting market questions in any case.

I’ve always been skeptical about private 5G, even for IoT applications. It’s not a matter of private-IoT 5G not working, as much as it not being worth the effort when other technologies are suitable and easier to adopt and use. WiFi is obviously the best example, and the ONF says its goal is “making private 5G as easy to consume as Wi-Fi for enterprises.” Ananki proposes to do that by deploying its private 5G on public cloud infrastructure, creating a kind of 5G-as-a-service model, and I think this could be a breakthrough in at least removing barriers to private 5G adoption. There is, of course, still the matter of justification.

Details are still a bit sparse, but the Ananki model is a 5G plug-and-play. You get private white-box radios from either Ananki or one of their certified suppliers, SIM cards for your devices, and they use SaaS to spin up a private 5G cloud-hosted framework on the cloud of your choice. You manage everything through a portal and pay based on usage. All this is admittedly pretty easy.

Easy is good here, because enterprises are almost universally uncomfortable with their ability to install and sustain a private 5G network. In fact, fewer than 10% of enterprises say they would know how to build a private 5G network. Since other research I’ve done suggests that very few enterprises (again less than 10%, which is roughly the statistical limit for this) who don’t know how to do something would even explore whether the “something” could make a business case, this reduces the prospect base for private 5G.

Which isn’t the same as saying that making 5G easy makes the business case, of course. The Ananki model is going to create a cost that WiFi or other traditional IoT network technologies might not create. That complicates the business case. The flip side is that private 5G might support some IoT applications more easily than one of the network alternatives. In the net, I think it’s safe to say that there is an opportunity base for the Ananki offering, and I also think it’s safe to say that it would be larger than the opportunity base for other private 5G models, such as those from the mobile network incumbents. How big, and how much bigger, respectively, I cannot say with the data I have.

Before we write this discussion off as an intellectual exercise, consider this truth. A 5GaaS offering based on open-source, fielded by a company that’s established as a “Public Benefit Corporation”. This isn’t a common designation, but in short it’s for-profit company whose board is free to consider the stated public benefit cited in its charter as the basis for decisions, and not just shareholder value. Were the technology foundation of Ananki proprietary, their cost base would be higher and their customer offering more expensive. Were Ananki a traditional corporation, it would have to evolve to maximize shareholder value and the board might be challenged by 5G- or open-network-promoting decisions that didn’t benefit shareholders first.

Open-source is a cheaper framework for something like this. Open-source ONF Aether technology is what Ananki packages. Could that technology be packaged by others? Sure, or it wouldn’t be open source. Could other open-source network technology be packaged by someone to do the same thing? Sure. Could an open body create a cookbook so enterprises could package the necessary technology on their own? Sure. In other words, this approach could be extended and made competitive, creating market buzz, alternatives in approach, other features, and so forth.

It might also be extended. The difference between public and private 5G comes down to spectrum and licensing. Aether is the basis for a DARPA (Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) project, Project Pronto, to create a platform for secure, reliable, research communications. DARPA’s origin was ARPA (without the “Defense”) and ARPANET is seen by most as the precursor to the Internet, so might Project Pronto launch something bigger, broader, and even become a model for service providers? Sure.

The ONF is, IMHO, an underappreciated player in the 5G space, as I noted in an earlier blog. Their Aether model takes open-model 5G beyond O-RAN and frames a very complete open infrastructure model for 5G. It’s possible that Ananki will drive that model to private 5G commercial reality, but even if it doesn’t, Ananki will validate the notion of open-model 5G from edge to core, and that will surely influence how service providers view 5G infrastructure. That might make it the most significant contribution to open-model 5G since O-RAN.

Mobile operators, and operators in general, are increasingly antsy about proprietary lock-in, as a recent story on Vodafone shows. Nokia’s decision to embrace O-RAN shows that even mobile network vendor incumbents recognize that there’s growing demand for a more open approach to network infrastructure. It could be that the Ananki model the ONF has devised will provide a more effective pathway to that.

Certainly it will be a test case, and one test that’s going to be interesting is the test of the way network equipment vendors respond. All network-operator-oriented standards-like groups tend to be dominated by equipment vendors because there are more vendors than network operators, and because network vendors have strong financial incentives to throw resources into these initiatives. It’s not only about contributing and learning, but also about controlling and obstructing. I’ve been involved in many of these initiatives, and I’ve never seen a single case where at least one vendor didn’t throw monkey wrenches into some works.

The big question with ONF/Ananki is whether the spin-out model that obviously worked for the ONF would now work for other standards bodies. The first time something like this is done, it could sneak through because opposition by vendors hasn’t really developed. If Ananki shows signs of failing, then vendors can paint the failure as a failure of open-model advocates to field anything that can actually be deployed. If it shows signs of succeeding, then will vendors try to ensure other bodies don’t follow the ONF’s approach?

Open model networking has a challenge that open-source doesn’t share. You can start something like Linux or even Kubernetes with a single system or cluster, respectively. Networks are communities, and so the first real implementation of a new strategy has to be a community implementation. Ananki is a path toward that, and while it may not be the only way to get to open-model networking in the future, it may be the only way that’s currently being presented for mobile infrastructure. In short, Ananki could revolutionize not just private 5G but open-model 5G overall.