- Open RAN dead? Not according to vendors and operators
- Ericsson and Nokia remain primary suppliers, which continues to raise the same old questions about whether today’s open RAN deployments are truly open
- Integration challenges, unclear cost savings and slow emergence of new radio vendors are tempering expectations
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2026, BARCELONA — On the surface, it’s easy to say open RAN is dead. One of the original goals of the movement was to break the vendor lock-in that Ericsson and Nokia held and create an environment where multiple suppliers are available for operators to mix and match their products.
Today, both Nordic vendors continue to be primary suppliers to mobile carriers. In the U.S., Ericsson is leading the open RAN charge for AT&T, which very publicly hitched its star to open RAN in 2023. Yet being led by a single vendor, it doesn’t look very “open” to a lot of people.
Piling onto the situation, this week we learned about the dismantling of the Open RAN Policy Coalition, which appeared to be another sign that the open RAN movement is unraveling if not already defunct.
But that’s not the view at Mobile World Congress 2026 on the show floor. Numerous sources here told Fierce Network that nothing could be further from the truth. Some dared to say open RAN is actually thriving, the wave of the future and the only way operators are ever truly going to achieve their goals of bringing new, monetizable use cases to fruition.
They may be serving the open RAN Kool-Aid, but they’re certainly committed to the cause.
“I do not think that open RAN is dead. I actually think that open RAN is alive and kicking,” said Yigal Elbaz, SVP, Technology and Network Services and Network CTO at AT&T. “I think you're seeing more established operators around the world getting it in an RFP or in the process of migrating to the movement.”
From his perspective, the technology itself isn’t the problem. Elbaz said there’s enough evidence and testing to demonstrate that at least some of the open RAN interfaces can already be executed, but what people may be referring to when they say open RAN isn’t living up to expectations is in the number of new radio vendors.
Establishing a new radio vendor takes time, he said. It’s also important to note that an operator isn’t going to rip out its existing radios and network components to adopt a new open RAN specification. They need some kind or precipitating event – new spectrum, a new generation of technology or some other reason to do a refresh.
“I think people are looking at this in a limited lens, which is how many radio players exist or don’t exist,” he said. “It's a complex platform, but potentially the same thing that happened in routing or the same thing that happened in compute can happen in radio and we just need to be ready.”
Dish Wireless — the poster child for open RAN
Part of the “open RAN is dead” story line stems from what happened to Dish Wireless. The U.S. poster child for open RAN, Dish built its 5G network on open RAN specs and won a lot of industry accolades for it. But due to forces unrelated to the network, Dish is in the process of dismantling its network and becoming a hybrid operator that uses its own 5G core but the RAN of AT&T under an MVNO arrangement.
Elsewhere, operators are pushing forward. Along with AT&T in the U.S., Rakuten in Japan, 1&1 in Germany are making tangible progress in their embrace of open RAN, said Masum Mir, SVP and GM, Cisco Provider Mobility.
“We have been a big proponent of open RAN,” Mir said. “One of the largest deployments that we feel very proud about is Rakuten.”
But what about all the naysayers out there? “Maybe I'm a little bit of an optimist. I do have optimism bias, but technology progression in any industry, you have to have patience.”
Cristina Rodriguez, VP and general manager of the Network & Edge Group at Intel, said conversations are happening all the time in the industry and they revolve around an open ecosystem.
“As an industry, we continue believing in open RAN and virtualization of the RAN,” she said. “I see both things together – openness of the network and the virtualization of the network.”
They’re also tightly entwined with the big topic of the day: AI. “That starts with an open and virtualized RAN. That’s what is going to give you the flexibility, the scalability,” she said. “It’s what’s going to allow you to do software upgrades and bring the new use cases.”
Open RAN vs. vRAN
Sometimes it’s hard to tell where vRAN ends and open RAN begins and vice versa.
Alok Shah, VP of Networks Strategy at Samsung Electronics America, said that in the early days of vRAN and open RAN, there was overlap, but they were separate. They’ve since merged – in a way.
Open RAN is broader than vRAN and goes much farther into the network. “Open RAN actually stretches all the way into the heart of the RAN, not just the radio interface,” Shah said.
These days, every RFP he sees from operators calls for new builds to be open RAN compliant. “The requirement has been that the open RAN protocols be supported,” he said.
Whether all the vendors are moving to bona fide open RAN specifications or paying lip service, that’s to be determined. But from Samsung’s perspective, all the new radios it builds are capable of open RAN.
“All the operators want the optionality that comes with open RAN,” Shah said. Even if an operator is starting with an all-Samsung architecture or someone else’s, “you still want that option to be able to say down the road, ‘OK, I’m going to introduce a third-party radio vendor’ as circumstances warrant. Having open RAN support built into your network makes that possible.”
Still, challenges remain. Aji Ed, head of Partner Cloud RAN Solutions at Nokia, said the reason open RAN appears to be limping along has to do with the fact that performance, interoperability and cost reductions aren’t coming together as one might hope.
Even though something may be O-RAN compliant, “you still need to do some work between different companies to make sure there is an integration activity between these companies to make it work,” he said. “That takes time, collaboration, integration in the labs. That is why it takes time to really make that a reality.”
Another reason: pricing. “The reason why they were pushing for O-RAN was because of the cost reduction operators were expecting, but in practice, that's not really visible as a cost reduction,” he said. “They're not seeing cost reduction as one of the key items here.”
Ericsson and Nokia: We are open
For their part, the traditional RAN vendors reject the idea that they’re standing in the way of openness. Both Nokia and Ericsson insist their product portfolios are all open RAN-compliant.
“All our products today, you are able to mix and match with any other products,” said Joe Constantine, chief strategy and technology officer for Ericsson Americas.
Of course, “we want to sell the whole portfolio,” he said. However, “we think the best solutions will prevail and a healthy ecosystem that’s open is good for everyone.”
Overall, the introduction of open RAN is, relatively speaking, a slow process – as it should be – and that means it's going to be less disruptive to operators’ daily lives, said Monica Paolini, principal at the analyst/consulting firm Senza Fili.
“Open RAN is alive and well,” she told Fierce. “It’s just that it's not the kind of massively disruptive RAN transformation that is going to change all the Tier One vendors’ market share or anything.”
It’s better this way because it’s a much more mature way to progress the RAN, she said. “I think we should see the evolution of the RAN as a continuous, incremental process, rather than changing everything overnight,” she said. “In that sense, it gives me a sense that things are much more under control in terms of cost, performance and risk.”
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.