Report
Nov 2022
Interest in Open RAN continues to grow, especially now that industry pioneers are reporting positive progress from their initiatives and moving ahead with wider rollout plans. Confidence has also been boosted by independent industry studies which prove that the performance of large scale, commercial open RAN networks can rank among the best networks in the world.
More operators who are not already committed to rolling out Open RAN have announced plans to at least explore its potential, and to share knowledge and experiences with other operators. Open RAN, while not yet the mainstream approach, has nonetheless become a mainstream influence on the strategies of operators and vendors, large and small.
That influence can be seen in how the focus of industry discussion about Open RAN has shifted. Operators have moved on from concerns about whether Open RAN was technically feasible to considering how to operationalize this new kind of radio access network. Several years into the Open RAN project, operators now place less emphasis on seeing a 30-40% reduction in RAN capex than on the benefits of greater operational agility, faster speed in turning up new services, and opportunities to experiment.
