Open RAN equipment market forecast 2023–2030

31st July 2023

Sheryl Miles

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Open RAN deployments in public 5G networks will accelerate after 2025, as many mobile operators enter new contracts, and interface standards become mature enough for rigorous interoperability testing.

By 2030 there will be 1.3 million Open RAN cells deployed, worth $19.2 billion, finds the latest report from Rethink Technology Research’s wireless forecasting service – RAN Research.

Such headline numbers mask varying rates of progression towards full blown Open RAN among operators, both in terms of which interfaces have been deployed and whether multiple vendors are involved. Migration to Open RAN will not occur as a single decisive step for many operators, but through a series of iterations with only the end game being to deploy the whole stack and open it up to multiple vendors. The great majority of early Open RAN deployments are or will be single vendor and only embrace some of the interfaces.

By the end of the forecast period, a big majority of Open RAN cells will only have deployed some of the possible interfaces. This underlines Open RAN as being a direction of travel for operators, rather than a single jump, whether it is being deployed in a greenfield situation for a new network, as part of the 5G build out for legacy operators, or during migration of existing cells.

In this report a detailed forecast breakdown of the various Open RAN interface combinations is discussed, as well as divisions by frequency, active antenna types, 4G versus 5G, along with numbers of FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) and TDD (Time Division Duplex).

Unlike some wireless technology sectors, such as automotive, Open RAN deployment does not exhibit any clear regional divide and for this reason there are no detailed breakdowns by geography. Far more important than any regional distinctions are variations between individual operators in their contractual cycles.

Europe’s big five telcos – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Vodafone, BT, and Telefonica – all have contracts expiring around 2025 or 2026 and this will provide an opportunity for a significant switch towards Open RAN.

It is notable that even Deutsche Telekom, and Vodafone, the two most evangelistic about Open RAN of those five, only plan for a minority of their cells, around 30% at most, to be Open RAN by 2030. However, as our forecast suggests, the majority of new cell deployment worldwide will be Open RAN from 2029 onwards.

Early adopters of Open RAN have been mostly greenfield sites, irrespective of geography. It is true that Japan has led the field, but that is because one of its major operators, Rakuten Mobile, has been building its 5G network from scratch. This in turn galvanised the country’s number one MNO, DoCoMo, but at least partly because this happened by happy coincidence to fit into its business cycle.

Elsewhere, Dish Network in the USA is also a strong early Open RAN adopter largely because it is also building a new 5G network. In such cases risks associated with early Open RAN adoption are less, with no legacy to accommodate.

This is the latest forecast in the RAN Research Archive, which now includes: