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After AT&T's $14-billion Open RAN deal with Ericsson, what comes next?
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Ericsson said that it has a few other Open RAN coals in the fire
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An analyst at EJL Wireless Research says Verizon is already working with Ericsson, as well as Samsung, on open RAN
AT&T may be the first announced major mobile network operator (MNO) open RAN deal for Ericsson, but the Swedish networking equipment giant is already working on open RAN with other service providers like Verizon, EJL Wireless Research analyst Earl Lum told Silverlinings recently.
AT&T’s $14 billion open RAN push was the “first announced but [Ericsson has] been doing this with Verizon already,” Lum told us in an email. Verizon, however, has taken a different tack to the AT&T approach.
Lum knows his radio stuff, according to Dave Bolan, an analyst from Dell’Oro Group, who spoke with Silverlinings at the Cloud Executive Summit in Sonoma, Calif., last week.
“[Lum] kind of tipped us about [the Ericsson-AT&T deal] about two or three days before it happened,” Bolan said.
Not looking good for Nokia
New Street Research (NSR) has already said that Ericsson is a major RAN vendor at AT&T and the vendor is the 2.5 GHz 5G midband RAN vendor for T-Mobile, while Verizon selected Samsung as its 4G and 5G RAN vendor in 2018.
NSR noted that all this leaves Nokia as a minority vendor at all three major MNOs in the U.S.
Lum said that Verizon is already doing their own internal version of open RAN by mixing and matching Ericsson and Samsung equipment. Part of the principle of Open RAN is that an operator could build a network out of equipment from multiple vendors, avoiding lock-in.
“If anything, its largely a software play, integration [and] modernization,” neXt Curve analyst Leonard Lee said of the Ericsson-AT&T deal last week. “I don’t think it's as big of win for Open RAN as everyone’s making it out to be.”
Talking to Silverlinings at our summit in California last week, Bipin Thomas, a product manager at Ericsson, said that the Swedish RAN dealer has “a few more deals in the works” around Open RAN and more, including with unnamed European operators. He was largely coy about giving names though.
Surprise!