Ray Dolan, chairman and CEO of Cohere Technologies, joins the Light Reading podcast to discuss how Cohere is working with partners such as VMware, Capgemini Engineering and Intel on developing an open RAN platform for Vodafone that improves 5G capacity.

For its part in this open RAN platform, Cohere says it can double 5G network capacity, in comparison to traditional MIMO, with its Spectrum Multiplier MU-MIMO scheduler. There are potential cost savings to service providers by improving 5G network capacity, but Dolan also sees major revenue opportunities for webscalers and service providers in the enterprise applications that they can support.

"There is a ton of money in industrial automation if you can bring 5G to bear there, and in order to do that, you need new architecture," says Dolan.

In addition, Dolan provides some insight on the potential geopolitical implications of deploying open networks, and sees opportunity for Western vendors to even the playing field with incumbents such as Huawei.

"Open the architecture and allow for the emergence of a new set of players," says Dolan. "If new merchant silicon players are allowed to come in, and the Western world is full of them … if we can move this to a cloud play, silicon play and open play, there's a real opportunity to reset and 5G and all G's beyond that to be a Western-led innovation."

However, Dolan notes that this debate can't just be about politics; the value of the technology developed by Western vendors will be critical to the success of open networking.

"It's an absolute hot button issue right now in the world as we debate this. It needs to move beyond tariffs and blocking and move to the merits of the innovation driven by Western leaders, not just the desire to not buy a Chinese product."

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading