Despite poor performance so far, Dell'Oro Group thinks O-RAN will have a near 25% share of the RAN market by 2029
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is planning to roll out O-RAN infrastructure with partners in the Pacific region
Just don't expect it to be a multi-vendor world
The Trump administration is still keen on boosting open radio access networks (O-RAN), buoyed by a new Dell’Oro Group report that predicts O-RAN and cloud RAN could hold a nearly 25% share of the RAN market by 2029.
The analyst group noted that O-RAN still has a way to go to reach this target. The firm said that short-term projections have been revised downward for 2024, while firms like Grand View Research have previously noted that the O-RAN market was worth $4.5 billion in total in 2024, with much of the spending happening on the hardware side.
“Even with ongoing challenges and delays, we still anticipate that most operators will gradually incorporate more openness, virtualization, intelligence, and automation into their RAN roadmaps,” noted Dell’Oro Group VP of RAN research Stefan Pongratz of the report. “At the same time, the impact will be mixed. While O-RAN fronthaul interfaces are being adopted and Open RAN is accelerating the shift towards vRAN/Cloud RAN, this vision that Open RAN will catalyze multi-vendor RAN, bring down prices, and change the vendor dynamics is fading.”
Swedish vendor Ericsson’s $14.5 billion Open RAN deal with AT&T, which was announced in December 2023, set the pattern for the modern-day O-RAN deal. This deal looks to be a largely single vendor deal for Ericsson, despite AT&T previously claiming that it plans to have 70% of its wireless network traffic running across open-capable platforms by late 2026.
Political radio spin
Despite this, President Trump’s administration – like Biden’s before him – appears keen on Open RAN even though there is no major American vendor that can support the push, only Nordic champions like Ericsson and Nokia and American specialists such as Mavenir. The White House said that Open RAN networks were mentioned during Trump’s meeting with Japanese prime minister Ishiba Shigeru.
A White House statement said that the U.S. would work with Japan and other partners, such as Australia, the Philippines, South Korea and others to “deliver high quality infrastructure investments in the [Pacific] region, including the deployment of Open Radio Access Networks in third countries.”
This is similar to how Biden wanted Open RAN to be a bulwark against major Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE, albeit with a Pacific-orientated focus so far.
This has led the Financial Times to openly wonder whether the Trump administration would resurrect a plan from 2020 to take a “controlling stake” in Ericsson, Nokia or both, so that the U.S. could instantly barge its way onto the RAN infrastructure scene by buying its way in.
There’s no sign of this actually happening yet, but with much talk already about Ericsson moving its headquarters to the U.S., it may not be out of picture, even if it seems like an outlandish concept right now.