Open RAN to account for more than 10% of RAN market
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Faye Sutton
| 09 February 2021
Worldwide sales of Open RAN are to grow at double-digit rates over the next six years according to analyst firm Dell’Oro Group.

In its Open RAN Advanced Research Report, Dell’Oro predicts that cumulative investments in the technology, which is key for the development and take-up of 5G networks, will reach $10 billion during the 2020-2025 forecast period.

Other findings from the report show that short-term projections have been adjusted upward while the near-term outlook has been revised slightly downward, reflecting the state of the market for both greenfield and brownfield networks.

Meanwhile, cumulative virtualised RAN revenues – defined as the proportion of RAN baseband/compute capex that will use general-purpose processors for CU and/or DU – are projected to surpass $5 billion over the forecast period.

In January 2021, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone announced they are joining forces to support the rollout of Open RAN as the technology of choice for future mobile networks across Europe.

“The conversation and the overall attitude towards Open RAN has clearly changed over the past six months," said Dell’Oro VP and analyst Stefan Pongratz commenting on the Open RAN Advanced Research Report. "It is no longer a question of if Open RAN will happen… it is now more [about] the timing and the scope."