- Santiago “Yago” Tenorio joined Verizon as its new CTO after a storied career at Vodafone in the UK
- The open RAN guru observes some common ground between Verizon and Vodafone
- He also questions how the industry defines ‘open RAN’
Is open RAN dead? Santiago “Yago” Tenorio, the open RAN trailblazer who left Vodafone for Verizon late last year, hears that question a lot.
The short answer: No. The longer one but perhaps not what everyone wants to hear: Maybe the industry needs to re-examine what it really means by “open RAN.”
Spun out of a desire by operators to break the vendor “lock-in” that vendors like Ericsson and Nokia commandeered, open RAN – short for the oh-so-catchy “Radio Access Network” – was launched years ago as a way to enable operators to mix and match products from different vendors. The advantages of an open RAN strategy: more competition in price and availability. That was the idea, anyway.
Stuff happened. The Open RAN Alliance emerged as the body overseeing specs for open RAN, officially known as O-RAN. Nokia got involved, and so did Ericsson, which won AT&T’s open RAN business in an eye-popping $14 billion deal in 2023. Some smaller vendors fell off the radar – and/or their prospects started looking shaky as hell.
TL;DR version: Much of what’s transpired boils down to single-vendor open RAN deployments, going right back to where it all started from. Sort of.
But it’s more complicated than that. Because, of course it is.
RAN: The more the merrier
Verizon ditched Nokia as a wireless RAN vendor years ago, awarding a contract to Samsung instead. Its other major infrastructure vendor is Ericsson.
RAN usually is the biggest line item in a mobile operator’s budget, and having supply chain “optionality” is a good thing, Tenorio said.
In fact, for a domain like radio, it’s not healthy to have only two vendors to choose from. “You can debate what is the right number, but certainly it is not two,” and probably not three, either, he told Fierce. “You need four or five. That would be a more competitive landscape.”
Can an operator like Verizon afford not to consider Nokia? “I don’t think you can because there are not enough vendors. That’s the problem … We don’t have enough vendors in this space now,” he said.
So, even though Nokia already lost most of the North American business, unless it really screws up, it could have another shot at Verizon’s radio business sometime in the future. Unless, of course, upstart radio vendors emerge to take its place.
As an example of Verizon’s open RAN commitment, Tenorio pointed to a distributed antenna system (DAS) deployment in Texas that includes gear from Samsung and CommScope.
It’s the first DAS commercially deployed in the Verizon network using open RAN interfaces with various components from different vendors. Samsung is providing its virtual distributed units (vDU) with an O-RAN interface to a CommScope DAS.
Are we likely to see more of these deployments? Certainly, where it makes sense to deliver a better experience for customers, “we absolutely will replicate that in similar opportunities for in-building systems,” he said.
Verizon-Vodafone ties
Since joining Verizon in late October, Tenorio has observed some similarities between the U.S. operator and his old stomping grounds in the U.K. It’s worth nothing that these two companies are not exactly strangers; Vodafone at one time owned a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless.
As for open RAN, Verizon’s vRAN stack, which includes more than 130,000 O-RAN capable radio deployments in the U.S., is similar to what Vodafone deployed in the U.K., in the sense that they both use Samsung software, Wind River’s operating system and off-the-shelf servers.
“The architecture is the same, the concept is the same and the vendors coincide, to a certain extent. When I was at Vodafone, that’s what I would call open RAN. Verizon has traditionally called that vRAN. I think it’s a semantic thing,” he said.
In fact, Verizon’s vRAN deployment may be the largest of any brownfield operator in the world, he said. But he’s not apologizing if the overall open RAN deployments thus far are not measuring up to everyone’s expectations.
“I think the industry kind of created some expectations in terms of the timing for open RAN that were probably not realistic,” he said. “I can’t comment on people being disappointed because open RAN didn’t follow the expectations that they created themselves.”
The industry can debate open RAN and its prospects until the cows come home – or until the big industry trade show known as Mobile World Congress 2025 closes its doors in Barcelona in early March. But then it will surely endure for months on end after that. Probably years, if history is any indication.
Asked about Verizon’s open RAN deployment thus far, analyst Earl Lum of EJL Wireless Research, who famously predicted the demise of Nokia at AT&T, said he doesn’t consider it truly open RAN.
“It’s not right now, but could be at some point down the road,” he said. “So it’s ‘open RAN ready.’ As far as I know, there’s no Samsung vRAN unit talking to an Ericsson radio.”
From the UK to NJ
To be sure, open RAN isn’t Tenorio’s only jam. Amid a wide-ranging discussion that included his thoughts on the advantages of the Verizon Cloud Platform and a promising future for APIs, Tenorio talked about his decision to upend his roots and move 3,000 miles away to start anew at Verizon.
After nearly 30 years at Vodafone, it was like family to him, he said. Shortly before his departure, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K., one of the most prestigious industry honors that few professionals achieve.
“I made a fabulous career in that company. I gave the best of me to Vodafone and Vodafone gave me a phenomenal set of opportunities. I had fun. I made a career. I can only say good things about Vodafone, and I would have happily stayed there and retired, but the opportunity came up for this job.”
He couldn’t turn it down. “How can I say no to an opportunity to start in another company that I admire, in the only other operator I would probably work for?,” he said.
He and his family relocated to Jersey City, N.J., with a striking view of New York City and a short commute to Verizon’s headquarters in Basking Ridge. It’s been worth the move, both professionally and personally.
“It’s working,” he said. “It’s a new adventure.”