Dell’Oro Group has rustled up its first real downbeat forecast for open radio access network (RAN) equipment.
“We revised the Open RAN projections downward by 5% to 10% for the 2023-2027 forecast period,” Stefan Pongratz, VP and analyst at the Dell’Oro told Silverlinings in an email. This contrasts to January this year, when Dell’Oro predicted that Open RAN would represent up to 20% of global RAN by 2027.
Pongratz still predicts that Open RAN revenues will account for more than 15% of global RAN by 2027. However, he said, “We are still forecasting the market to grow through 2027, it is just not projected to grow as much as we previously expected."
Dell’Oro said the forecast reflected some some hesitancy among operators about these next-generation architectures.
“The downward revision is impacting all regions, though it is more pronounced in Europe and the Asia Pacific regions,” Pongratz noted. Some of the top operator proponents of Open RAN are Rakuten Mobile (OTCMKTS: RKUNY) in Asia, Vodafone (NASDAQ: VOD) in Europe, and Dish in North America.
Dell’Oro said that European operators have been ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to announcing Open RAN targets, but they have been more cautious with deploying Open RAN, focusing on building out 5G using traditional RAN. The baseline forecast, which assumes more delays in Europe, is for the European Open RAN market to surpass $1 billion by 2027.