Operator Strategies for Evolving to an Open RAN Architecture 3
The industry wants more
information on Open RAN: Nearly
half (44%) of respondents say they
are familiar with Open RAN but need
to learn more about the technology.
And another 23% say they are not
familiar with Open RAN at all.
Industry players are divided on
implementing Open RAN. While
40% of respondents said they plan to
deploy Open RAN in the next 12
months to two years, another 40%
said they have no plans to deploy the
technology. Interestingly, when we
looked solely at the survey response
from network operators, we see that
network operators are more bullish
on open RAN implementation than
the rest. 27% of our network
operator respondents said that they
plan to implement Open RAN in the
next 12 months.
Capex and opex savings are
considered key to Open RAN
deployments. Savings in capital
expenditures (capex) was rated the
No. 1 consideration for adopting
Open RAN followed by savings in
operational expenses (opex).
Open RAN is considered significant
to enterprise deployments and rural
coverage. When asked to rank the
main use cases for deploying Open
RAN, respondents ranked enterprise
No. 1 followed by rural coverage.
Open RAN viewed as not yet ready
for largescale deployment. Only
6% of respondents said that they
believe Open RAN technology is
currently ready for large-scale
deployments. The majority (35%),
said that they believe it will be ready
in two to five years.
Integration and lack of maturity are
two areas of concern with Open
RAN. One of the benefits of Open
RAN is that it offers the potential to
use multiple vendors. However, this
can be challenge when a problem
arises because it may be difficult to
isolate and identify the cause of the
problem. System integration was
identified by respondents as the
biggest concern when deploying
Open RAN followed by the
technology not being mature enough
for commercial deployment.
Specialized systems integrators will
handle integration and support.
Because of concerns about system
integration, 33% of respondents said
that they believe specialized systems
integrators will be hired to handle
integration issues. Another 26% said
that global systems integrators will
be hired to handle those integration
challenges. However, when we
looked only at the survey response
from network operators, we found
that 24% of operators believe that
integration will be handled by
operator technical staff and 30% of
operators think it will be handled by
specialized systems integrators.
Similarly, when we looked at the
response from operators about who
will handle the support of Open RAN
in the network, we found that 27%
said that operator technical staff will
handle support and 24% said they
believed specialized systems
integrators will handle support.
This report is based on responses
from an online survey of 370
participants including mobile
operators, fixed line operators,
MVNOs, and hardware and software
vendors conducted by Mobile World
Live on behalf of Aspire Technology.
The largest group of respondents
(29%) are in the “other” category.
This group comprises a variety of
mobile industry professionals in
areas such as site acquisition, testing
and consulting. Mobile operators
made up the next largest group with
26% of survey participants. The
mobile operator group was divided
between mobile operators with
revenues of more than US$10
billion (13%) and mobile operators
with revenues of less than US$10
billion (13%). Hardware vendors
made up 18% of survey participants
followed by software vendors at
13%. System integrators accounted
for 9% of respondents and MVNOs
made up 3% of the group. The
smallest category was the tower
company/neutral host group with
just 2% of results.
Geographically, the largest group of
respondents (41%) were from
companies with headquarters in
Europe, followed by Asia (26%) and
North America (21%). The rest of
respondents were from the Middle
East (5%), South America (4%) and
Africa (3%).
Key Findings
Survey Methodology
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