- It was a roller coaster year for open RAN
- AT&T validated the technology when it selected Ericsson to lead its transition to open RAN
- But many people wonder about the roles of smaller vendors
The past year has been one wild ride for the open Radio Access Network (RAN) market.
It started on a high note with the relatively recent news that AT&T awarded Ericsson a $14 billion contract to supply its open RAN network. AT&T spent subsequent months explaining how theirs wasn’t a single-vendor strategy but one that would include multiple suppliers.
By the end of 2024, AT&T added a couple more radio vendors to its repertoire and lawmakers discussed open RAN’s potential role in helping to thwart future security attacks from China. But revenue-wise, it wasn’t the year for open RAN. Dell'Oro Group declared that open RAN again tanked for the second year in a row, with a 30% year-over-year revenue decline.
“The long-term trajectory is positive, but the short-term picture remains blurry,” wrote Dell’Oro analyst Stefan Pongratz.
Those are just the high (and low) points. Here’s a stroll down memory lane looking at some developments in open RAN over the past 12 months.
MWC: AT&T, Ericsson hit first open RAN milestone with a 5G cloud RAN call
AT&T and Ericsson kicked off the year by announcing that AT&T’s commercial traffic was flowing on Ericsson’s cloud RAN sites, the first of which were located south of Dallas, using 3.7 MHz C-band spectrum. It was a milestone in AT&T’s multi-year journey to deploy open RAN in 70% of its network. See the story here.
Smaller open RAN vendors claim they’re not at death’s door
After AT&T’s selection of Ericsson to lead its open RAN deployment, concerns mounted about the role of smaller vendors in the open RAN movement. After all, one of the big drivers for going with open RAN is to break the vendor lock-in imposed by Ericsson and Nokia. Some smaller vendors, like Mavenir, said not to worry. See the story here.
What’s up with AT&T and its multi-vendor open RAN strategy?
Of course, questions persist. AT&T insists it’s pursuing a multi-vendor strategy with open RAN, even with Ericsson in the driver’s seat. In July, Fierce caught up with Maulik Shah, who works in AT&T’s RAN engineering headquarters, to hear how the transition to open RAN was going. He described how Fujitsu’s open RAN radios had not yet been certified, but the expectation was for Fujitsu and Mavenir equipment – and possibly others – to be added to the mix. See the story here.
Verizon tips its hand on open RAN with new CTO appointment
Although it seemed as though much of open RAN revolved around AT&T in 2024, it’s not the only brownfield U.S. carrier embracing the technology. With the hiring of Santiago “Yago” Tenorio as its new CTO and SVP of strategy and technology enablement, Verizon gave a clear signal of its intent to pursue open RAN. Tenorio was the open RAN guru at Vodafone, which plans to deploy open RAN on 30% of its European sites by 2030. See the story here.
This is how T-Mobile plans to supercharge the RAN
One big U.S. operator that isn’t jumping on the open RAN bandwagon is T-Mobile. The operator doesn’t believe open RAN can match what traditional RAN delivers. It plans to supercharge the RAN with Nvidia. So far, the work is confined to a lab in Bellevue, Washington, where T-Mobile is working with Nvidia, Ericsson and Nokia to figure out how artificial intelligence (AI) will make the RAN work better and more profitably in the real world. See the story here.
Boost Mobile ditches VMware for Wind River
Boost Mobile – formerly Dish Network – was the first U.S. operator to launch a network based on open RAN. Even though it faced huge financial uncertainties in 2024, the operator continued to sing the praises of open RAN. One of the benefits is the ability to switch out vendors without causing major disruptions, which it did with the ouster of VMware and the addition of Wind River. See the story here.
AT&T expands open RAN vendors with Mavenir, Fujitsu
Eventually, AT&T introduced new players to its open RAN ecosystem, making it official that Fujitsu and Mavenir are among its radio suppliers. During AT&T’s analyst day, AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh described how they’re starting to scale the transition to open RAN across the U.S., taking a “popcorn approach” to swapping out the gear site by site in multiple geographies. See the story here.