- AT&T’s ‘multi-vendor’ open RAN strategy appeared to be centered on Ericsson
- But AT&T says it inked new agreements with Fujitsu and Mavenir for open RAN radios
- The new radios initially will power small cells, but AT&T’s COO said the overall strategy is bigger than that
With the addition of Fujitsu and Mavenir as radio vendors, AT&T appears to be making good on a promise that its open radio access network (RAN) strategy truly is multi-vendor in nature.
One year ago, AT&T announced a $14 billion contract with Ericsson to lead its open RAN network deployment, which meant it was ditching Nokia. At the time and for months afterward, it looked very much like a single open RAN deal, even though one of the oft-touted reasons to go with open RAN is the ability to mix and match products from different vendors.
AT&T executives over the past several months insisted that their approach is multi-vendor. As of July, Ericsson was the sole supplier of AT&T’s new radio hardware, but the expectation was that Fujitsu, Mavenir and potentially others would be certified to work on AT&T’s network.
With today’s announcement, it’s evident that Fujitsu and Mavenir passed the test.
During a media event Tuesday – the same day as AT&T’s 2024 Analyst & Investor Day presentations – AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh explained that Ericsson had the largest share of AT&T’s RAN when it was awarded the open RAN business last year.
“It wasn’t so much that we said Ericsson is going to do this better than another provider,” McElfresh said. “It was much more the case where their footprint in our network was significantly larger and therefore the transformation had a little bit better headwinds.”
When it came to adding other radio vendors, AT&T was looking for suppliers that could integrate into a brownfield environment and Fujitsu and Mavenir were a “little bit more mature” in their technology than anyone else, he said.
While the deal with Ericsson was announced a year ago, AT&T is still at the very beginning of its network transition, according to McElfresh. At the beginning of 2024, it worked on the process of swapping out old Nokia gear, which was present in about one-third of its network, and replacing it with Ericsson. It's now starting to scale that transition site by site across the U.S.
“We won’t be complete with this effort until we get into the later stages of 2026,” he said. “It’s going to ramp considerably each and every quarter, but we won’t be fully through this transition, replacing all of our radio access network gear with the new design, until we get close toward the tail end of ’26 and into ’27.”
‘Popcorn approach’ to open RAN swaps
AT&T has already done “thousands” of these swaps and proven that it can be done with live traffic on its network with minimal disruption to service. The swaps are being done over multiple geographies at the same time in what AT&T internally calls a “popcorn approach,” referring to sector sites that are converted one by one over the course of the three-year program.
And it’s important to remember that it’s not just Nokia gear that’s getting ripped out. AT&T is also updating Ericsson equipment so that it is open RAN compliant.
McElfresh said he’s impressed by the pace of the change-over. “It’s actually moving a lot more smoothly than I would have anticipated at this stage of the program,” he commented.
While the initial play for Fujitsu and Mavenir radios will be in small cells, he said there’s a bigger strategy at play here, and part of that has to do with the scarcity of spectrum. The industry is lobbying Congress to reinstate the FCC’s auction authority, but it also has to operate in an environment that is spectrum constrained.
“Ultimately, when you don’t have access to an unlimited spectrum bucket, you have got to find new ways of managing that traffic, and that’s why the open RAN strategy of AT&T is really important for us,” he said.
Open RAN allows for building more mission-specific signaling arrays for venues to manage particular types of traffic in a way that wasn’t available with the big main infrastructure providers. “This is the real innovation and why we’ve started in this part of the ecosystem,” he said.
That’s not to suggest that Fujitsu, Mavenir or others won’t find their way into larger or taller cell sites that carry more traffic, but “we see the strategic value of our RAN modernization as a way to create an open environment where I can use the nation’s largest fiber network, which we’re significantly expanding, to find ways to serve traffic without the need to rely upon more licensed spectrum being available in the market.”
Focus on fiber
In a recent report for investors, New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin said AT&T has the weakest 5G spectrum portfolio among the big three carriers, with significantly less upper mid-band spectrum than Verizon or T-Mobile. That has led AT&T to focus on fiber as a source of advantage in wireless, with AT&T claiming higher mobile market share where it has fiber, he noted.
Indeed, McElfresh said AT&T decided about four years ago that every network is going to be a fiber network over time, with different access technologies at the edge. “We used to call the edge the last mile,” he said. “I think we now need to start calling that edge the last meter or the last foot because that’s how far fiber is making its way into these networks.”
Convergence is a huge part of that and not just in the services AT&T offers. “Our convergence is really about how we are converging our networks to being able to serve these customers and meet the demand and do it better than anyone else,” he said.
And that sounds like a very on-point message to be delivering on AT&T’s Analyst & Investor Day.