The news was broken in a low key mention at Fyuz – seems impetus was added by Ron Sani, VP of RAN Technology at AT&T, becoming TIP’s chair
Ericsson has joined the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), confirming its membership during a presentation at TIP’s Fyuz event in Dublin last week which had 1,200 attendees. The Swedish network equipment provider has long claimed to embrace a multi-vendor, disaggregated approach to the RAN, which was one of open RAN’s original principles.
Some in the industry have remained sceptical about Ericsson’s ‘conversion’, but in any case, it seems the wheel has turned. Earlier this year, Stefan Prongratz, VP, Dell’Oro Group, said, “The fundamental assumptions shaping the role Open RAN will play in this RAN journey have not changed. Over time, operators will incorporate more virtualization, intelligence, automation, and O-RAN into their RAN roadmaps. However, the business case for multi-vendor RAN is less compelling.”*
The ”less compelling” was underlined by the deal Ericsson struck with AT&T last December, which is worth up to $14 billion over five years. Perhaps the nudge for Ericsson to finally join TIP came from Rob Soni, VP of RAN technology at AT&T becoming the organisation’s new chairman.
The Mobile Network’s analysis of Ericsson’s position is well worth a read, particularly about AT&T’s plans for moving to cloud RAN over the next three years.
No doubt the organisation is glad of Ericsson’s presence and will be looking to attract some more heavyweights as it is no longer rely on support from Meta. The Telecoms Infrastructure Project (TIP) was set up by Facebook back in 2016 as part of its Facebook Connectivity push, to get more people online to use its products. The division was closed down in late 2022.
RAN still on downward run
A new report on the RAN market published last week by Dell’Oro found that conditions “are slowly improving but remain challenging”. Its initial calculations show that the overall RAN market – including baseband plus radio hardware and software, but excluding services – declined in 3Q24, marking a sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year (Y/Y) revenue decline.
“Tougher comparisons, excess capacity, monetization challenges, and capex fatigue negatively affect both capex levels and investment priorities, providing operators with an opportunity to calibrate their RAN budgets to better align with historical capital intensity and RAN/capex ratios,” said Pongratz. “So, the problem is not just lower capex levels. Operators are also adjusting the proportion of the capex allocated for RAN.”
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