The most important business justification for open RAN, according to 49% of respondents, is to “increase vendor diversity / reduce lock-in.”
This focus on vendor diversity is consistent with Heavy Reading’s 2018 survey and with operator commentary over the intervening period. The market for RAN equipment is highly concentrated and, in some countries, operators now only have a choice of two or three vendors. This situation has been exacerbated over the past two years by geopolitical issues. The focus on vendor diversity is therefore expected and readily explainable. “To improve coverage in new and/or marginal geographies” is the second most important reason to pursue open RAN, followed closely by “new service and monetization opportunities” in third.
5G is now driving open RAN technology development and network planning.
The preferred deployment scenario, with 65% of the response, is for 5G New Radio (NR) to be deployed into existing brownfield network environments. This appears to signal an important turning point because until recently, it was reasonable to argue that open RAN was better suited to LTE, which is a better understood, “easier” technology. In contrast, 5G had advanced capabilities that were not widely (if at all) supported by open RAN vendors. US respondents have a greater interest in open RAN for 5G (75%) than the Rest of World (RoW) respondents (57%). An important caveat is that 5G is nearly always deployed with or alongside LTE.
A relatively small 13% of respondents believe open RAN technology is now “mature for large-scale deployment.”
A more significant 28% believe it is “mature for certain use cases.” Probably the most interesting aspect of the result is to consider this 28% in combination with the 27% that say open RAN is “close” to being ready for commercial deployment. It is worth keeping in mind that close to one-third of respondents (29% and 3%) think the technology is still some way from ready.
The most important business justification for open RAN, according to 49% of respondents, is to “increase vendor diversity / reduce lock-in.”
This focus on vendor diversity is consistent with Heavy Reading’s 2018 survey and with operator commentary over the intervening period. The market for RAN equipment is highly concentrated and, in some countries, operators now only have a choice of two or three vendors. This situation has been exacerbated over the past two years by geopolitical issues. The focus on vendor diversity is therefore expected and readily explainable. “To improve coverage in new and/or marginal geographies” is the second most important reason to pursue open RAN, followed closely by “new service and monetization opportunities” in third.
A large majority (77%) of respondents would prefer to work with two or three lead vendors to minimize the commercial risk of open RAN.
Only 8% of operator respondents say their company wants to integrate many vendor components in-house. This preference for working with a smaller number of lead vendors is one of the clearest results of the survey.
A small lead group of respondents (16%) say their company has already deployed multi-vendor digital unit (DU) and radio unit (RU) equipment in their networks.
This is consistent with public comments from operators in the US and Japan that they now have multi-vendor DU-RU operational at small scale. A much larger 45% say they will deploy multi-vendor DU-RU in the next one to three years.
Operators are interested in the idea of “O-RAN-compliant” networks sourced from a single vendor, but they are also cautious about it.
Nearly a quarter (23%) say this is “very interesting.” The dominant response, however, is the 49% that believe this “might be useful,” which indicates this idea is being seriously considered. Which way that 49% breaks as operators continue their analysis and gain more information on what “O-RAN compliant” really means will probably determine if this model takes off in a meaningful way.