Speaking at TowerXchange Meetup Europe, chief commercial officer Abdulrahman Al Moaiqel outlined how the firm supports multiple mobile operators running their networks from a shared Open RAN setup without relinquishing control over software, features or propagation strategies.
“Existing models of sharing, rather than owning the infrastructure, started to impose difficulties on MNOs to roll out new technologies,” Al Moaiqel said. “Classic infrastructure models will not support the rollout mode that we wanted.”
TAWAL’s model, implemented in partnership with Nokia, hosts three operators on a single tower using a shared server. Two share the same chassis and virtualised resources under an active sharing agreement, while a third runs on a separate virtual machine.
According to Al Moaiqel, the setup delivers cost reductions of 40–60% compared to typical single-operator Open RAN deployments.
“Have we seen Open RAN widely deployed yet? Not really,” he said, citing interoperability issues and the unexpected complexity of integrating multi-vendor systems. “The savings it promised are being eaten away by integration costs.
“The interoperability is still a big challenge. In fact, it adds a lot of complexity, and the multi-vendor interoperability costs are eroding the savings that we're expecting with the Open RAN.”
To surpass these challenges, he said TAWAL was taking a leaf out of the hyperscaler playbook by offering compute and radio resources as a service while leaving operators free to run their own software stacks.
“When we get our operators on our site, we give them the full freedom of choosing their own RAN software, so Mavenir, Rakuten or whatever of their RU software can be implemented on a hosted environment.”
The firm’s proposed setup is positioned as a way to maximise efficiencies in space, compute, and power. The shared model allows for different business arrangements, with operators able to opt for co-located compute or virtual machines rather than bearing the full cost of dedicated servers.
Al Moaiqel said the concept goes one step further, but enabling operators to share antennas, which he said provides “even further optimisation”.
The company is also applying the model to millimetre wave deployments, traditionally costly and limited by propagation issues.
TAWAL is testing a shared mmWave setup where a single 800 MHz radio serves multiple operators, using spectrum dynamically on a first-come, first-served basis. The idea is to bypass spectrum auctions altogether, leasing high-frequency bands by zone, particularly in dense urban areas and indoor environments.
“Instead of imposing a lot of costs over redundant antennas, we have the capacity to share all of that 800 MHz, and it will be underutilised for a while, until the ecosystem happens and all of the use cases are implemented,” Al Moaiqel said.
He stressed that, while the model isn’t without limitations, particularly when multiple technologies must be supported by a single hardware platform.
TAWAL is currently aiming the server at smaller-scale and private networks, indoor solutions, and greenfield sites where the economics are more favourable.
The Open RAN project recently won a national R&D award and is being framed as a proof-of-concept that could be adapted in other markets and for other high-band 5G deployments.
But Al Moaiqel remains cautious, with the main hurdles being business-model related, with operators looking for differentiation and regulatory structures that often lag behind the pace of technical change.
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