The questionnaire used in this study was written by Heavy Reading, with input from Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, and Radisys as sponsors of our 2020 Open RAN Market Leadership Initiative. The online survey was promoted by email to Heavy Reading’s service provider databases. It garnered 75 responses from individuals working at communications service providers after non-qualified responses were deleted from the survey. Respondents were asked to self-assess their knowledge about mobile RAN strategy; those that reported “no direct knowledge” or only “a little knowledge” of their company’s RAN strategy were also excluded from the survey and their responses are not considered in this analysis.
Respondent demographics are shown below. The response is led by mobile operators and converged or cable operators with mobile businesses. Respondents are generally from developed economies, with the majority working for operators reporting more than $1bn in annual revenue. Network engineering & planning and R&D/technical strategy are the main job roles represented, accounting for a combined 69% of respondents. The US is the largest region by a distance; however, there is a good representation from RoW, enabling this analysis to reasonably compare US and RoW responses.