Operator Buying Patterns to 2025

Openness comes to most proprietary technologies, because it is a time honored way of bringing down pricing in any given market. Whether Open RAN concepts emerge in the next 12 months or over the next four years, it will have the same effect.

There are a variety of candidate technologies lining up to Open the RAN, and operators and vendors alike are pulling in multiple directions – but one thing is certain, what emerges from the early years of 5G will change the shape of the cellular industry forever, with the big OEMs mostly hoping to take a traditional and proprietary approach, and operators insisting that they break up the RAN into separate open functions, where every vendor offering can interoperate with every other product. It is this that will re-introduce competition into the cellular market, driving down price points, which are in turn needed so operators can experiment with new business models.

A series of start-ups, exemplar operators and smaller existing equipment vendors are all pushing different varieties of open approaches to the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN).

But today a fully Open RAN platform is a long way off and there are many obstacles in its path, not least of which is the entrenched position and heavy R&D investment of the major OEMs. There are also risks seen by some operators of partnering with an immature and fragmented open solution. But the driver that makes open RAN irresistible is the need for a more competitive multi-vendor approach to drive down costs.
This report lays down a number of scenarios of how open systems will prise open the RAN market – with some adoption likely to some open APIs during 2020, and some scenarios not unfurling until deep into 2025.

Companies mentioned in this report;

Airrays, Airspan, Allot, Altiostar, Amarisoft, Anikowave, ARM, Askey, ASOCS, Athonet, AT&T, Beicells, Ball Aerospace, Bell Labs, Bharti Airtel, British Telecom, China Mobile, China Mobile Research Institute, China Unicom, CHIPS Alliance, Ciena, Cisco, Cloud-RAN Alliance, Comba, Deutsche Telekom, Docomo, Ericsson, Facebook, Fujitsu, HFR, Huawei, H3C, Innoeye, Intel, KDDI, Keysight, KT, Lenovo, Linux Foundation, Mavenir, Metaswitch, NEC, Netcracker, Nokia, NTT, OKI, ORAN Alliance, Orange, Parallel Wireless, Phluido, Pivotal Commware, Quanta, Qualcomm, Radisys, Rakuten, Red Hat, Reliance Jio, Ruckus Wireless, Samsung, Sercomm, Singtel, SK Telecom, Softbank, SOLiD, Sprint, Tech Mahindra, Telefónica, Telstra, TIM, Verizon, Viavi, Vodafone, WiFi Alliance, Xilinx, ZTE.

For more information contact:

Natalia Szczepanek
Client Relations and Marketing Manager
[email protected]
Office: +44 (0)1179 257019