Open RAN Equipment Market Forecast 2023-2030
Open RAN deployments will ramp up to $19.2bn by 2030 as interoperability standards and testing mature says a new report from Rethink Technology Research in the UK.
The deployment of Open RAN 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, says the report.
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 the technology of those five, only plan for a minority of their cells, around 30% at most, to be Open RAN by 2030.
However the forecast suggests the majority of new cell deployment worldwide will be Open RAN from 2029 onwards.
These headline figures mask varying rates of progression towards full blown deployment among operators, both in terms of which interfaces have been deployed and whether multiple vendors are involved. Migration 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 deployments are or will be single vendor and only embrace some of the interfaces.
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By 2030 a majority of Open RAN cells will only have deployed some of the possible interfaces. This underlines the technology as 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 says the report, which breaks down 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).
Early adopters 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 galvanized 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 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.
The report is here
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