Operator confidence in open RAN products jumps in 2024

Open RAN is getting closer to commercial viability at scale. More than half of respondents (58%) to the newly released Heavy Reading 2024 Open RAN Operator Survey expect their company to have "a scaled live deployment in a city, region, or larger area" by the end of 2025. Among larger operators — those with more than $5bn in annual revenue — 69% expect to have a scaled live deployment by the end of 2025. This data indicates that open RAN technology could be close to an important adoption threshold.

Heavy Reading has asked operators how they perceived the maturity of open RAN solutions in each of its past three surveys. The figure below shows how they ranked the maturity of overall system performance, RAN feature set and cloud infrastructure in autumn 2021, winter 2023 and summer 2024 (a three-year period). Operators have clearly seen improvements over each interval — to the point where 48% of the 2024 respondents believe open RAN products/architectures are now "mature for scale deployments." This strong and encouraging result is consistent with the view that open RAN is making progress.

Open RAN is "mature for scale deployments" (2021 vs. 2023 vs. 2024)

The results shown in the above figure make it tempting to conclude that open RAN is close to "crossing the chasm" and that widespread deployment is likely from 2025 onward. As with any new wide area network technology, however, some prudence in interpreting survey data is warranted.

First, there is a difference between city-scale deployments and larger regional or nationwide open RAN networks, which are not differentiated in this survey. Scaling a new RAN technology into such a vast industry and moving from city-scale to nationwide networks will take time. The good news is that leading operators already have large open RAN deployments. The focus now is on broader adoption at an industry level.

Second, it is likely that open RAN deployment will be linked to individual operator timing and circumstance rather than an industrywide phenomenon over a short, defined period. This is not a surprise because open RAN was never expected to be a globally unified rollout as 4G and 5G were. Instead, it will intersect operators' RAN refresh and modernization programs.

Third, a delta exists between technology/product readiness and commercial confidence to deploy. Once operators are confident in technology, architecture and products, they need a strong supplier ecosystem with stable finances, advanced manufacturing and commitment to R&D and long-term product support. Confidence in the commercial ecosystem is as fundamental as technology readiness. The participation of large, established vendors is critical to generating this confidence and, therefore, to the mainstream adoption of open RAN. Focused new entrants can establish a market position and help ensure commercial flexibility and competitiveness.

In conclusion, open RAN is making concrete progress and is increasingly embedded in vendor product roadmaps and operator deployment plans. At the same time, this article is a call for realism. Operators have a great responsibility to maintain reliable mobile network services — critical services we all rely on — and this inevitably forces a stepwise approach to scaling open RAN.

The full report is available to download here.

This blog is sponsored by Samsung Networks.