Open RAN investment set to surge over next five years

Proponents of open radio access network (Open RAN) technology have long made the case that it will be the basis of the universal network for the future, and a study from specialist telecommunications analyst Juniper Research has predicted that the growing Open RAN industry will begin to take off commercially, with annual operator investment into Open RAN set to rise sharply from $2bn by the end of 2024 to $11bn in 2029.

Fundamentally, the Open RAN community, headed by organisations such as the O-RAN Alliance, believes the technology can allow users to benefit from a fast and secure mobile network that can be quickly and cost-effectively scaled to meet peaks in demand, as well as new cloud-based services.

The Open RAN ecosystem sees the fundamental technology as a platform for innovation that would not otherwise have been possible, offering new ways to enhance customer experience and introduce change at an accelerated pace. The community, in particular operators such as Vodafone, is also confident that what it regarded as Open RAN’s “superior flexibility” will allow customers to take full advantage of 5G Standalone (5G SA) networks.

Recent work in Open RAN has seen operators facilitating outdoor testing of technology, seen as important for the technology’s development, as new test cases for Open RAN are explored and new applications of the technology are discovered. These include streaming video content using Open RAN infrastructure.

The next phase of the testing is looking at assessing how well Open RAN works in practical outdoor settings, mirroring the conditions faced by mobile network operators to provide insights to shape the future of global comms infrastructure.

Juniper said its research, Global operator O-RAN strategies, 2024–2029, is based on a dataset containing more than 24,000 market statistics over a five-year period. It said it has produced the most comprehensive assessment of the O-RAN market to date, including market analysis, a Competitor Leaderboard and in-depth forecasts for 60 countries.

Overall, the analyst stressed how Open RAN supports multi-vendor deployments, and enables operators to expand artificial intelligence deployments. It added that the culmination of nearly $40bn of global investment into AI network automation by 2029 will be driven by the need to cater for increasing cellular connections and data. Indeed, the report forecasts that cellular data usage will more than double over the next four years, owing to the expansion of new 5G broadband services and the use of 5G for the internet of things (IoT).

Juniper advised in the report that to enable telecommunications networks to efficiently process this increased data, AI-based traffic steering is a crucial service enabled by Open RAN. Traffic steering is designed to enable operators to maximise the efficiency of networks through the automated routing of cellular traffic to maximise network resources.

Looking towards future Open RAN deployments, the report urged operators to leverage AI-based traffic steering to intelligently steer traffic based on application. This, said Juniper, will enable operators to prioritise applications dependent on low latency, ensuring that load balancing will occur with minimal impact to connectivity.

“Operators must leverage AI-based traffic steering to improve connectivity services, such as enhanced mobile broadband, with network traffic generated by these connections being given priority steering to the base station offering the lowest latency to maximise the value proposition for users,” said research author Alex Webb.