“We need more options,” said Santiago Tenorio, head of networks strategy at Vodafone, one of Europe’s largest mobile operators. Radio access networks — the masts and antennas that connect to phones — take up “the biggest share of our wallet and with the least number of vendors,” he said.
As the telecoms industry converges in Barcelona for its annual Mobile World Congress next week, Open RAN is meeting the moment.
After years of tempering expectations around the technology, Swedish vendor Ericsson recently signed a landmark $14 billion deal with telecommunication giant AT&T to build an Open RAN-based network in the U.S. The deal paves the way for a possible industry-wide shift and signals that the political tug-of-war between cheerleaders and critics is, for now, being won by the former.
But the Open RAN campaign has also driven a wedge between U.S. and European Union officials, as Europe’s policymakers fear the technology could kill the bloc’s leadership in one of the few areas of technology where it still leads.
America’s way into 5G
U.S. administration officials have been preaching the virtues of Open RAN at forums including the G7, the Quad security alliance with Australia, India and Japan and the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) with Atlantic partners.
Critics argue the campaign is an attempt to shoehorn American technology into 5G infrastructure. The U.S. lacks a domestic contender to Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. The Open RAN technology would open the concentrated telecom equipment market to some of its heavyweights — cloud providers and tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft — as well as specialized hardware and software companies like Dell and Mavenir.
