Two years is a long time, especially in the telecoms industry.

It’s been almost two years since we last dug deep into Open RAN, just as momentum around the technology was growing, with carriers announcing trials left, right, and center.

And while some of that excitement remains, it feels as if it’s assessment time from the industry, which is looking to grade the work done so far.

Open RAN, or O-RAN as it’s also known, allows providers to mix and match solutions from multiple vendors, which is impossible under most current network setups.

Traditionally, Radio Access Network (RAN) hasn’t been like this, instead involving proprietary technology, with equipment from one vendor rarely being capable of interfacing with other components from rival vendors.

Several operators, vendors, government bodies, and collaborative industry groups have pushed for Open RAN as a way to diversify the vendor supply chain, allowing for greater interoperability of mobile networks.

Causes for concern

Since 2023, there has been an increase in the number of commercial Open RAN deployments, but has it been enough?

Not according to analyst firm Dell’Oro, which reported a decline of 30 percent in revenue for the first three quarters of last year.

“The Open RAN movement has come a long way since the O-RAN Alliance was founded in 2018,” Stefan Pongratz, VP industry analyst, Dell’Oro, told DCD.

“Keeping in mind that the mission with this movement is to ‘reshape the RAN industry and ecosystem towards more intelligent, open, virtualized, and fully interoperable mobile networks,’ I think the results so far are mixed.”

The report blamed slower 5G adoption and delays in readiness of the technology for the slump.

“From a revenue perspective, progress has stalled a bit. In retrospect, Open RAN revenues accelerated rapidly between 2019 and 2022,” says Pongratz. Since then, investments have declined, he adds.

Multi-vendor RAN hasn’t taken off as expected

Opinions are split on Open RAN and its credentials. Dimitris Mavrakis, senior research director at ABI Research, remarked on LinkedIn that “Open RAN is dead,” suggesting that tier-1 vendors have taken over.

“Safe to say that Open RAN will not meet its initial promise, but will morph to something else, likely dominated by tier-1 vendors. Perhaps interest will shift to the AI RAN alliance and AI will dominate all discussions,” Mavrakis posted in early February of this year.

Interestingly enough, ABI said in 2020 that it estimates that total spending on Open RAN radio units for the public outdoor macrocell network will reach $69.5 billion in 2030.

Mavrakis’s view that vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia will dominate Open RAN may not be too far off the mark. For example, the $14 billion Open RAN deal that Ericsson won from US carrier AT&T back in 2023 is effectively a single-vendor deal and not particularly open, as many in the industry have pointed out.

But Pongratz says he expects Open RAN to take off in the long term, noting that there’s a collective push from many within the industry to make it a success.

“Vendors making up around half of the global macro RAN market are embracing most of the pillars in the broader Open RAN vision. O-RAN-ready hardware will soon no longer be the exception but the norm.”

However, he does acknowledge that the short-term outlook for Open RAN is less clear, bemoaning the speed at which operators have activated Open RAN.

“The movement is not enough to change the vendor dynamics and the business case for multi-vendor RAN,” adds Pongratz. “While the split between multi-vendor and single-vendor RAN is not too asymmetric so far, the results are masked by the greenfield mix. As brownfield deployments comprise a greater share of the Open RAN market, the share of single-vendor O-RAN will rise.

He adds that while no one expected O-RAN “would be a magic architecture that would somehow change the rules of the game, the multi-vendor progress is underwhelming, even with a very low bar.”

Hard to usurp the incumbents

One of the main arguments for Open RAN was that it was meant to help diversify the supply chain of mobile networks.

It promised to open up the RAN to new players, driving competition for the incumbents such as Ericsson, Nokia, and other big names like Samsung. This is perhaps why, in 2021, Ericsson claimed that Open RAN would be more expensive than traditional RAN and offer worse performance.

“There’s been a motivation to try and break the stranglehold that a handful of companies have had on the RAN market,” says Philip Laidler, managing director for consulting at telecoms industry research firm STL Partners. “So given that, it's not been very successful.”

But Laidler does think Ericsson and Nokia have changed their ways slightly over the years in the face of new dynamics.

“To some extent, Ericsson and Nokia have made quite a few concessions,” he says. “I wouldn’t say they’ve always fully embraced Open RAN as a movement, but they have sort of shifted their positions to a more open one, although some people would argue that to get them on board has resulted in less openness.”

Cost is a key factor too, according to Earl Lum, president, EJL Wireless Research. He says companies such as Ericsson and Nokia have significantly deeper pockets for R&D to further the technology.

“It’s hard because competitors are constantly chasing this golden ring around the merry-go-round that's just inches from their grasp,” Lum tells DCD.

“The ring isn't static, it moves, and that ring is R&D. So when you look at the R&D of Nokia and Ericsson, they're pouring billions of dollars while the startups are pouring tens of millions of dollars. You’re not going to outspend the incumbents.”

He likens the tier-1 vendors to Formula One and its competition to push karts. “As the incumbent continues to move, you have to keep pace. But keeping pace isn't good enough.

“This race always ends up with the incumbents winning.”

Are carriers embracing O-RAN?

EJL’s Lum suspects AT&T’s lucrative deal with Ericsson suggests a hesitancy from the industry to trust different partners.

“AT&T saying [to other vendors] that you're not ever going to be the main guy, sort of tells you what every other operator might be thinking but hasn't publicly said,” argues Lum.

He uses Vodafone and its Open RAN network as an example. The operator plans to have at least 30 percent of its European sites running on Open RAN technology by the end of the decade.

The company, which began its Open RAN deployment in the UK in 2023, opted for Samsung as its vendor partner.

“It’s likely Samsung will secure a fairly big chunk of that [Open RAN], but the other 70 percent of its network is split between Ericsson and Nokia, because that’s who Vodafone trusts,” says Lum.

“It’s the same thing for Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and Telefónica. How much of this percentage are they actually going to allocate, and how much do they trust that that vendor is going to be around in 10 years for the next kit upgrade that's going to happen?”

There’s a temptation to stick to just one radio supplier for mobile operators, says Professor Emil Björnson, head of division at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

“As a telecom operator, it’s very convenient if you can buy your equipment from someone who takes the responsibility for the entire network. Single vendor networks may be one of the best options right now,” says Björnson.

He notes operators can then swap out different components further down the line as long as the equipment is Open RAN compliant.

Mavenir’s Open RAN battles

One of the hopefuls looking for a piece of the Open RAN action is Mavenir Telecom.

Formed in 2017, the US software company has been one of the biggest advocates for Open RAN.

It has won contracts with operators including Telefónica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Dish, and Virgin Media O2.

The company also has deals with Norway's Ice to support the operator's 4G and 5G networks and Bermudan newcomer Paradise Mobile.

But despite that hope, the company has faced financial difficulties after missing interest payments on debt.

“We’d like to see more big wins,” Mavenir’s then SVP for business development, John Baker, said in October 2023.

Baker, who at the time was the face of the company’s Open RAN push, made the comments at Fyuz, an event hosted by the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which was founded in 2016 to promote industry-led collaboration around open networks, and also includes the Open RAN Alliance’s Open RAN Summit, and the more recent Metaverse Connectivity Summit.

Even back then, Baker acknowledged that the bigger vendors proved difficult to compete with. Baker has since left the company.

But Mavenir’s Rick Mostaert, vice president of product management, RAN, told DCD more recently that it’s seen successes in the Open RAN field and is confident that the technology and its own business can thrive.

“I think there have been some successes, but also some things that we wish would go faster, from a technology standpoint,” says Mostaert.

He feels the industry is more open than it has ever been, citing Open RAN deployments in the US, such as Boost Mobile, and in Japan and Europe.

“Other industries have been more open, while cellular stuck where it was a bit closed off, at least mentally in some cases,” he says. “But that's all changed in the last three years, where we now have Open RAN networks deployed around the world.”

Mostaert declined to comment on the reported financial hardships but did make clear his view on single-vendor Open RAN.

“I don’t think single vendor RAN is in the spirit of Open RAN,” the incumbent challenger says, noting that this isn’t what Open RAN was intended to be.

“It’s the operator's choice, but marketing single-vendor RAN as a thing, I don’t understand that or the advantages of that. You’re saying you are Open RAN, but you’re not really open if it all comes from one place.”

That said, he insists that the bigger-name vendors are welcome, noting there’s no reason from a technical standpoint that the incumbent's radios can’t be mixed with different RAN vendors.

6G might be the big enabler, not 5G

Software firm Red Hat has also thrown its hat into the Open RAN ring. The IBM subsidiary has penned several deals with operators, including Deutsche Telekom.

Even then, Hanen Garcia, global telco solutions manager, Red Hat, accepts the rollout of Open RAN networks has been slower than anticipated.

He says this has been because the industry has been slow to adopt the idea of Open RAN.

“It’s moving forward, but it’s not speeding up. If we had Open RAN specified just after 4G, we’d be in a different situation,” notes Garcia.

“But, unfortunately, it happened in the middle of when everybody was already deploying 5G.”

He’s positive that the approach from several carriers to push Open RAN, such as Vodafone and KDDI, is evidence that there’s an appetite for open networks, but warns that it will take time.

“Things probably aren’t going to accelerate at the speed as everybody would expect, probably when 5G Advanced is going to start rolling out, and when we going to get close to 6G.”

That’s a view shared by many that DCD spoke to about Open RAN’s future projection.

Björnson suggests that there’s an opportunity over the next five years for the industry to become more comfortable with Open RAN networks ahead of the 6G era, which is widely expected to launch commercially around 2030.

STL’s Laidler also expects Open RAN to flourish when 6G comes. “I think with 6G it will be a lot more like Open RAN than it is now,” he says.

“I think you will be able to disaggregate more of the components, if you want to. If you look at the 5G Core you have a lot more disaggregation. There you can generally buy lots of components, hardware, and software for all completely separate entities, and you can knit them together. There will be a lot more of this with 6G.”

Build it and they will come

As Open RAN deals continue to be announced by carriers and network vendors across the world, it would seem the technology is here to stay.

And although the rollout hasn’t been as quick as many would have expected, there’s optimism that it will grow as hoped.

“It takes us 10 years to move from one generation to another, but the softwarization of the RAN is definitively on trend with other technologies in the past,” says Garcia, who believes single-vendor Open RAN deals will translate to multi-vendor as Open RAN matures.

Mostaert is equally bullish about Open RAN’s chances.

“If you look at the ecosystem of companies involved in Open RAN from radio vendors, software vendors, chipsets, servers, it's everybody, right?” Mostaert says. “The ecosystem is very vibrant.”

Whether the optimism can translate into success for the challengers to the incumbents when it comes to securing big-money deals remains to be seen. For some hopefuls, the wait for 6G might be too long