New research from Dell’Oro Group finds multi-vendor RAN will account for more than 10% of the market by 2029
According to a new report by Dell’Oro Group, while Open RAN and Cloud RAN’s revenues are falling in in 2024 in line with the broader RAN market, the long-term trajectory remains healthy.
“Our long-term position remains mostly unchanged,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President of RAN market research at the Dell’Oro Group. “Even with ongoing challenges and delays, we still anticipate that most operators will gradually incorporate more openness, virtualization, intelligence, and automation into their RAN roadmaps.
“At the same time, the impact will be mixed. While O-RAN fronthaul interfaces are being adopted and Open RAN is accelerating the shift towards vRAN/Cloud RAN, this vision that Open RAN will catalyze multi-vendor RAN, bring down prices, and change the vendor dynamics is fading,” continued Pongratz.
The report find thats in the short term, the market will fall further than expected “due to a lower starting point and ongoing uncertainty surrounding the transition from ‘O-RAN ready’ to Open RAN”. The transition to Open RAN is a gradual process – the benefits and challenges vary, which is influencing the adoption rate of O-RAN radios and vRAN baseband.
The long-term trajectory is for Open RAN to make up more than 25% of the total RAN market in 2029 and multi-vendor RAN to account for more than 10% of the market by then. As a result, ‘purpose-built RAN’ will lose roughly 20% in value by 2029.
North America and Asia Pacific combined are projected to drive around 80% of the vRAN forecast.