Telecom carriers can expect a more than 50 percent reduction in operating expenses and total cost of ownership when they move from legacy networks to a full disaggregated vRAN (virtualized radio access network) and then an HPE Open RAN solution, said HPE RAN Automation Porfolio Lead Stefano Capperi.

The carrier network automation “journey” from legacy networks to vRAN and Open RAN provides a significant reduction in manpower to operate a carrier-class network with lower power consumption from industry-standard x86 servers and new multivendor software management capabilities, said Capperi.

“We are leading the assurance and orchestration management of the software today so we know how much customers are spending in radio access monitoring, management, infrastructure and software,” said Capperi. “As such we are comparing how much of a percentage they can save by automating certain activities run by the software itself.”

That said, Capperi cautioned, the 50 percent cost reduction will be realized over three or four years as telecom carriers move from legacy networks to vRAN and then O-RAN.

The new HPE RAN Automation software, which supports multivendor carrier networks, is being offered as a proof of concept for customers with general availability in November 2022.

HPE is planning to demo the Open RAN vRAN capabilities in Berlin next week. “It’s a way to simplify life and life-cycle management on the software and infrastructure for our partners and customers,” said Capperi.

A big part of cost savings will come from the use of x86 based HPE ProLiant DL110 Gen 10 Plus telco servers for the solution. Those servers will especially be effective for workloads at the edge with lower power consumption, said Capperi. Another HPE advantage is the toolset to manage network automation and monitoring of the platform with HPE’s RAN Automation service.

“In the TCO we calculated the investments on the new infrastructure to be purchased as well as the Opex savings that are the result of the [software] management tools,” he said.

HPE is using those calculations to provide specific savings for carriers on a case-by-case basis.

“We built the ROI tools and with the account teams are now ready to engage with customers because every network and environment is different,” said Tom Craig, vice president and general manager of HPE’s Communications Technology Group.”We’ll look at every business case on a network-by-network basis, modeling out the journey for them with the software toolkit.”

Here are five things to know about HPE’s Open RAN telecom offering.