Dell’Oro Group forecast that while open RAN revenue would account for 25 per cent of the total 2029 RAN market, its initial promise of creating a multi-vendor ecosystem looked less likely.

VP of RAN market research Stefan Pongratz stated while O-RAN Alliance fronthaul interfaces are being adopted and open RAN is fuelling the shift towards virtualised RAN and cloud RAN, “this vision that open RAN will catalyse multi-vendor RAN, bring down prices, and change the vendor dynamics is fading”.

Overall, open RAN and cloud revenue are trending down in 2024, as is the broader RAN market, but the research company stated the long-term trajectory remains healthy.

Pongratz told Mobile World Live the open RAN revenue decline for 2024 is in the 20 per cent to 40 per cent range.

Despite ongoing challenges and delays that include a slowdown in greenfield open RAN deployments, Dell’Oro is still bullish on the long-term prospects for RAN.

“We still anticipate that most operators will gradually incorporate more openness, virtualisation, intelligence, and automation into their RAN roadmaps,” Pongratz stated. “At the same time, the impact will be mixed.”

Dimitris Mavrakis, senior research director at ABI Research declared “open RAN is dead” on a LinkedIn post.

He noted “open interfaces do not create revenues but can only reduce costs or diversify supply chain”.

“Safe to say that open RAN will not meet its initial promise, but will morph to something else, likely dominated by Tier-1 vendors. Perhaps interest will shift to the AI RAN alliance and AI will dominate all discussions.”