The year 2024 was a pivotal one for Open RAN providers. The revenue for Open RAN hardware and software dropped by 90 percent during last year, according to Mobile-Experts, with the completion of greenfield deployments of DISH, Rakuten and 1&1 at the end of 2023.
So, 2024 marked the transition from greenfield to brownfield deployments.
But there was already more than a glimmer of hope for Open RAN deployments on January 1, 2024. Commitments by KDDI, Softbank, AT&T in 2023 had signalled the operators’ intent to roll out Open RAN, albeit more slowly than the previous greenfield deployments.
“We have a forecast that shows Open RAN growing again,” said Joe Madden, founder and president of Mobile-Experts. “Even though the revenue collapsed in the last year, we believe that it will grow steadily through 2030 and we’ll see a more and more diverse mix of operators in brownfield legacy operators that are now upgrading their networks or refitting their networks with Open RAN hardware.”
Greenfield deployments of Open RAN moved quickly from 2019 through 2023, but all of the legacy operators moved much more slowly in their deployment plans. Madden was not surprised by the length of time it is taking for brownfield Open RAN deployments to move forward, because of the complexity involved. “It’s not as simple as the early deployments by Rakutan, DISH and 1&1, which had no legacy equipment tying them to backward compatibility,” he said. “Brownfield operators have more gradual transition plans from closed RAN to Open RAN.”
As the year 2023 drew to a close, some of the biggest news for Open RAN was announced as AT&T committed to deploying commercial scale Open RAN in collaboration with Ericsson. This year was marked by the deployment of Ericsson and Fujitsu Open RAN radios across AT&T’s sites. AT&T plans to have 70 percent of its wireless network traffic access open-capable platforms by late 2026.
Beginning in 2025, AT&T plans to expand Open RAN throughout its wireless network in coordination with multiple suppliers including Corning Incorporated, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Fujitsu and Intel. The operator’s total spend will be $14 billion over five years, according to estimates.
The AT&T/Ericsson was a big loss for Nokia. But the manufacturer did have a significant win at the end of 2023 when it began deployment of a multi-vendor Open RAN network with Fujitsu for Deutsche Telekom (DT) in Germany. The technology is fully integrated into DT’s live commercial network and the initial cluster will provide 2G, 4G, and 5G commercial services to customers in the Neubrandenburg area of Northern Germany.
Nokia is deploying its commercial Open RAN 5G AirScale baseband solution in DT’s commercial network with Fujitsu radios. Both Nokia and Fujitsu have also agreed to explore Cloud RAN and other technology.
In May of 2024, a brownfield deployment was announced by O2 Telefónica, which moved its Samsung virtualized RAN and Open RAN network from the lab onto a live network in Germany. The site is now operating in Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, providing 4G and 5G services to customers with the plan to expand to seven additional sites in the region, further extending the Open RAN footprint.
The reasons to deploy Open RAN have shifted over time, according to Madden. Open RAN was originally pitched as a way to lower equipment costs through increased competition. However, the closed RAN manufacturers merely reduced their prices to match the Open RAN offering, so they could not sell on cost alone.
A seminal event in the Open RAN versus closed RAN competition unfolded in 2024 after closed RAN was chosen for greenfield 5G deployment of 460,000 base stations across India, in part, because the price was equivalent to Open RAN, Madden asserted.
“That was a devastating move, because it essentially pulled the rug out from under the Open RAN suppliers,” he said. “For example, today, AT&T is actually paying more for the Fujitsu radios than the Ericsson units.”
Even though price may not be the differentiator, legacy operators are still gravitating to Open RAN because of their desire for a greater variety of radio hardware and more customization of the radio hardware to special cases.
“We’re now finding that the operators benefit from increased variety of product functionality, and with Open RAN they can get products customized to the frequency bands, power levels and mechanical format that they need,” Madden said.
Another key benefit of Open RAN, according to Madden, is that it promotes the development of domestic supply chains. Using telecom hardware that’s manufactured within a country’s borders is advantageous for economic and security reasons.
“Open RAN provides an avenue for those vendors to engage in the market and provide the hardware without spending a billion dollars on research and development for the software side,” Madden said. “It’s more of a national sovereignty benefit, putting jobs within the country and political benefits of that.”
The Open RAN space gained a good deal of clarity in 2024, according to research performed by Mobile-Experts. It became clear that Open RAN would NOT expand the market to include different software platforms taking software business away from Ericsson and Nokia.
“Open RAN allows a company like Ericsson to actually dominate the software of the RAN market even more than they did before,” Madden said. “But it also opens up the opportunity for multiple hardware manufacturers to provide the localization and customization that allow for product differentiation.”
Madden projects that the network infrastructure market will eventually have one or two leading software players for the complex public telecom systems with a wide variety of hardware as the supporting cast. Ericsson has a lock on providing centralized unit/distributed unit software, but the number two position is still open, he said.
“Outside of Ericsson, Samsung is leading the market in virtual RAN, but they have a lower market share,” Madden said. “On the other hand, Nokia, is behind on virtual RAN but they have a larger market share and therefore a good chance at being a second provider of Open RAN software. On the whole, I would say that the contest for number two is not concluded yet.”
