The 2023 Open RAN market ended with a bang with AT&T awarding to Ericsson and Fujitsu a $14 billion deal to convert 70% of its traffic to run on Open RAN by end of 2026. 2024 started equally loud with the $13 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks from HPE on the thesis of the former company’s progress in telecoms AI and specifically in RAN intelligence with the launch of their RIC program.
2023 also saw the long-awaited launch of Drillish 1&1 in
Germany, the first Open RAN greenfield in Europe, as well as the announcement
from Vodafone that they will release a RAN RFQ that will see 30% of its 125,000
global sites dedicated to Open RAN.
Commercial deployments are now under way in western Europe,
spurred by Huawei replacement mandates.
On the vendor’s front, Rakuten Symphony seems to have
markedly failed to capitalize on Altiostar’s acquisition and convince
brownfield network operators to purchase telecom gear from a fellow network
operator. While Ericsson has announced its support for Open RAN with conditions, Samsung has been the vendor making the
most progress with convincing market share growth across the geographies it
covers. Mavenir has been steadily growing. A new generation of vendors have taken
advantage of the Non-Real-Time RIC / SMO opportunity to enter the space.
Non-traditional RAN vendors such as VMWare and Juniper Networks or SON vendors
like Airhop have grown the most in that space, together with pure new entrants
App players such as Rimedo Labs. With the acquisition of VMWare and Juniper Networks,
both leaders in the RIC segment, 2024 could be live or die for this category,
as the companies are reevaluating their priorities and aligning commercial interest
with their acquirers.
On the technology side, the O-RAN alliance has continued its
progress, publishing new releases while establishing bridgeheads with 3GPP and
ETSI to facilitate the inclusion of Open RAN in the mainstream 5G advanced and
6G standards. The accelerator debate between inline and look aside
architectures has died down, with the first layer 1 abstraction layers allowing
vendors to effectively deploy on different silicon with minimal adjustment. Generative
AI and large language models have captured the industry’s imagination and
Nvidia has been capitalizing on the seemingly infinite appetite for specialized
computing in cloud and telecom networks.
This report provides an exhaustive review of the key
technology trends, vendors product offering, and strategies, ranging from
silicon, servers, cloud CaaS, Open RUs, DU, CUs, RICs, apps and SMOs in the
open RAN space in 2024.
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