One oft-cited maxim in the communications world states that standardization is the enemy of innovation: its premise is that once something is standardized there is, by definition, no room to alter or improve it and hence no remaining freedom in which to innovate. Indeed, this is frequently cited as an argument against standardization—the fact that kills innovation. What is perhaps more relevant is that once something is standardized, the market for that product can become commoditised; this is generally good for the customer or consumer and not so good for the profit margin of the supplier. This ‘fact’ is conveniently overlooked by those opposed to standardization in a particular area.
The Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) has produced a set of standards for the internal interfaces within a mobile communications base station. Far from killing innovation, the advent of the OBSAI standards and their widespread adoption in the industry has actually stimulated innovation and is enabling groundbreaking infrastructure solutions to find their way into OEM products much more quickly and easily than would otherwise have been the case.
In an OBSAI-based base station, such as the Flexi Base station platform from Nokia Siemens Networks, all of the interfaces are defined and these definitions, along with comprehensive test specifications, are publicly available to everyone to download from www.obsai.com, free of charge. This enables an innovative start-up company to design a set of requirements for which it knows there is a potential end-market and which it is able to comprehensively demonstrate compliance (by means of the test specifications). Such a start-up can therefore design a product, confident in the knowledge that it can quickly and easily be incorporated into any OEM base station that follows the OBSAI standard, either to offer a niche solution which the OEM may not have thought of, or to offer a significant benefit in a mainstream product area (e.g. improved PA efficiency). Since OBSAI is not restricted to a single OEM, this also helps to diversify the product development risk somewhat; a further important benefit to a start-up.
From an OEM perspective, it simplifies the testing of a potential new product from a third-party supplier, in a real base station scenario, as it eliminates the need to spend months educating said supplier in the details of a proprietary interface. In many cases, the OEM simply does not have the time or spare resources to undertake such an activity and this represents a significant barrier to entry for new technologies in the infrastructure marketplace.
The advent of the OBSAI specifications has allowed a number of start-up companies to develop innovative products for the base station space. One area, in particular, has benefited greatly from OBSAI’s success: remote radio heads. Two start-ups that probably would not exist, but for the success of the base station standardization process are: Ubidyne and Axis Network Technology.
The Open Base Station Architecture Initiative is a forum of over 140 telecommunications companies—spanning module, component and base station vendor activity. Together they have created both open internal interface specifications for base station architecture and module specification covering the areas of Transport, Control, Baseband and Radio.