- Is open RAN dead? Not according to Airspan, Dell, Samsung, Fujitsu and Dell’Oro Group
- Vendors acknowledge the slow start to open RAN, but they report progress in moving to the multi-vendor stage
- Dell’Oro Group expects meaningful scale for both open RAN and AI RAN over time
At the beginning of 2025, Airspan CEO Glenn Laxdal told Fierce that he was jazzed about the open RAN market due to its growth prospects. Turns out, he wasn’t wrong.
“We saw increasing activity on open RAN beyond our initial expectations,” he told Fierce this month, when Airspan revealed a significant win with Rakuten Mobile. The deal calls for Florida-based Airspan to provide open RAN radio units (RU) across Rakuten’s mobile network in Japan.
“We also have ongoing discussions with many operators both in the U.S. and globally focused on open RAN deployments,” Laxdal said. “In 2026, we see ORAN continuing to progress in both public and private networks.”
Dell sees promise
He’s not alone. For Dell Technologies, 2025 was the year open RAN transitioned from a promising concept to a scalable, commercially viable reality, according to Sandro Tavares, director of Telecom Systems Marketing at Dell.
One of Dell’s newest contributions is the PowerEdge XR8000 series. For years, the business case for open RAN was hindered by the fact that it required multiple servers, which meant higher costs and complexities. With the PowerEdge XR8000, Dell delivered a solution that delivered performance parity with traditional systems on a single server, reducing costs and shifting the economics of open RAN.
That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and lollipops. The promise of open RAN has been around for quite a while and its journey has been akin to a marathon, he said. But the industry finally is removing the most significant adoption barriers.
“We are now set to see real progress in this domain,” he told Fierce. “The growing adoption of open RAN by major operators like Vodafone, AT&T and Telus underscores the industry’s readiness to embrace this transformation.”
Samsung: We’re encouraged
One of the most highly anticipated announcements of 2025 was Vodafone’s Spring 6 selection, which saw Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and Huawei all getting a piece of that business.
That marked a key milestone for Samsung, in addition to its participation in Orange France’s open RAN field pilot, according to Alok Shah, vice president of Strategy & Marketing for the networks business at Samsung Electronics America.
“While wide-scale open RAN adoption has been more gradual than initial industry forecasts, we’re optimistic about operators’ interest in open RAN, as well as vRAN,” he told Fierce. “We are encouraged by the progress.”
Early deployments across the globe have largely been single-vendor O-RAN compliant configurations, he noted, and Samsung understands that brownfield operators are going the single-vendor route to simplify integration. But as the infrastructure ecosystem matures and integration tools evolve, he expects more operators will evaluate multi-vendor open RAN.
Fujitsu’s RU and Ericsson’s DU
Another vendor proud of progress toward the multi-vendor realm is 1Finity, a Fujitsu company, which involved in AT&T’s open RAN deployment spearheaded by Ericsson.
As part of the first call on AT&T’s live commercial network, 1Finity’s RU was connected to an Ericsson distributed unit (DU). But it wasn’t just about connectivity, according to 1Finity Head of Wireless Marketing Rob Hughes.
1Finity also integrated its RU into Ericsson’s Service Management and Orchestration (SMO). As a result, “not only is multivendor management getting easier for mobile network operators (MNOs), but it is also opening up the opportunity to use rApps to increase programmability in multivendor environments,” he said.
Moreover, for AT&T’s initial open RAN deployments to densify its 5G network, AT&T selected 1Finity’s TDD and FDD outdoor small cell radios, which can be hidden, making them virtually unseen at the street level, he said.
“With 1Finity radios coexisting alongside Ericsson radios, it confirms what the industry has been working toward: Open RAN is now a practical option in brownfield networks,” Hughes said.
With wins at AT&T, SoftBank, Rakuten Mobile and Vodafone under its belt, 1Finity is certainly feeling good about its status in open RAN. But Hughes said the open RAN success story goes a step further than that.
This year’s FYUZ conference in Dublin, Ireland, was quieter, less dramatic and far less contentious than previous years, he observed. While that might make some folks think that translates into a dud of a show, he doesn’t see it that way.
“To me, that is the strongest signal yet that open RAN is no longer an experiment, a risky bet or a philosophical debate. It is mainstream,” he said. “For the first time, the energy wasn’t consumed by questions like ‘Will Open RAN perform as well as traditional RAN?’ or ‘Is it secure enough?’ or ‘Will operators really deploy it at scale?’”
Those conversations – which dominated past FYUZ conferences – were largely gone. “In their place, we saw large Tier-1 operators discussing deployment successes, scaling plans, multi-vendor roadmaps, and the next layer of innovation,” he said.
What’s ahead in 2026?
We’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the deluge of negative press open RAN inspired in 2025. Things did not go well for a lot of folks. EchoStar, the greenfield open RAN poster child in the U.S., exited the business as a fourth facilities-based carrier, although that had more to do with things other than open RAN. Mavenir left the open RAN radio hardware business to focus on AI. Plenty of commentaries focused on the pitfalls of open RAN.
Samsung’s Shah said they’re not focused on that. “We believe the industry commentary around the bleak future of open RAN is overstated,” he said. “On the contrary, we expect that 2026 will be a year of meaningful open RAN scaling, driven largely by operators in Europe.”
Stefan Pongratz, who closely tracks the RAN market globally for Dell’Oro Group, said his long-term view about the market remains unchanged, just as it has since he began tracking the market five years ago.
“We still expect both AI RAN and open RAN to grow in 2026,” he said. “Preliminary data for the 1Q35-3Q25 period indicate that open RAN is stabilizing this year. The near-term outlook for broader RAN developments in North America and Japan – combined with smaller gains in other regions – supports our projection of double-digit open RAN growth in 2026.”
Based on those projections, it looks like open RAN will live to see another day.