RAN Intelligence leaders 2023

RAN intelligence is an emerging market segment composed of RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) and their associated Apps. I have been researching this field for the last two years and after an exhaustive analysis of the vendors and operators offerings and strategies, I am glad to publish here an extract of my findings. A complete review of the findings and rankings can be found through the associated report or workshop (commercial products).

The companies who participated in this study are AccelleRAN, AIRA, Airhop, Airspan, Cap Gemini, Cohere Technologies, Ericsson, Fujitsu, I-S Wireless, Juniper, Mavenir, Nokia, Northeastern. NTT Docomo, Parallel Wireless, Radisys, Rakuten Symphony, Rimedo Labs, Samsung, Viavi, VMWare.

They were separated in two overall categories:

• Generalists: companies offering both RIC(s) and Apps implementations
• Specialists: companies offering only Apps

The Generalist ranking is:

#1 Mavenir
#2 ex aequo Juniper and vmware
#4 Cap Gemini

The Specialists ranking is:

#1 Airhop
#2 Rimedo Labs
#3 Cohere Technologies

The study features a review of a variety of established and emerging vendors in the RAN space. RAN intelligence is composed of:

• Non Real Time RIC - a platform for RIC intelligence necessitating more than 1 second to process and create feedback loops to the underlying infrastructure. This platform is an evolution of SON (Self Organizing Networks) systems, RAN EMS (Element Management Systems) and OSS (Operations Support Systems). The Non RT RIC is part of the larger SMO (Service Management and Orchestration) framework.
• rApps -  Applications built on top of the Non RT RIC platform.
• Near Real Time RIC - a platform for RIC intelligence necessitating less than 1 second to process and create feedback loops to the underlying infrastructure. This platform is a collection of capabilities today embedded within the RUs (Radio Units), DUs (Distributed Units) and CUs (Centralized Units).
• xApps - Applications built on top of the Near RT RIC platform.

The vendors and operators were ranked on their strategy, vision and implementation across six dimensions, based on primary research from interviews, publicly available information, Plugfests participation and deployments observation:

• Platform - the ability to create a platform and a collection of processes facilitating the developers' capability to create Apps that can be ported from one vendor to the other with minimum adaptation. Considerations were given to Apps lifecycle management, maturity of APIs / SDK, capability to create enabling apps / processes for hosted Apps.
• Integrations / partnerships - one of the key tenets of Open RAN is the multi vendor or vendor agnostic implementation. From this perspective, companies that gave demonstrated their integration capabilities in multi vendor environments of the hosting of third party applications were ranked higher.
• Non Real Time RIC - ranking the vision, implementation and maturity of the Non RT RIC capabilities.
• Near Real Time RIC - ranking the vision, implementation and maturity of the Near RT RIC capabilities.
• rApps - ranking the vision, implementation and maturity of the rApps offering
• xApps - ranking the vision, implementation and maturity of the xApps offering