- AT&T Network CTO says open RAN’s survival depends on scale from established operators
- Dish’s open RAN shutdown doesn’t signal the end of the technology
- Open RAN will remain an option in 5G and 6G – but not the only option
Dish Network – the poster child for open RAN in the U.S. – is decommissioning its network. Does that mean open RAN is dead?
Far from it, according to AT&T SVP and Network CTO Yigal Elbaz. In fact, the only way open RAN lives to see another day is through established operators like AT&T – not greenfield operators like Dish, he told Fierce on the sidelines of the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle last week.
“I’ve said this several times already in the past. The only way open RAN can exist and grow is with the scale of the established operators,” he said.
His answer is 100% unlikely to surprise anyone who’s been watching open RAN unfold over the past several years. AT&T drew a line in the sand when it awarded Ericsson a $14 billion multi-year open RAN contract in 2023. Sure, AT&T took a lot of flack for awarding the contract to Ericsson when the whole point of open RAN (for some people) was to break the domination of established vendors.
But other vendors are part of AT&T’s open RAN network, like Fujitsu’s 1Finity division, Dell Technologies and Intel. Elbaz insists they’re getting what they want from Ericsson – and that it’s as open as they want it. “They are open – as open as I want them to be,” he said.
That said, Elbaz acknowledged that he has a lot of respect for greenfield operators, including Dish, for building their network based on open RAN architecture.
“The issue is there’s only two or three of them around the world,” he said. “There is not enough scale for that to maintain the ecosystem.”
EchoStar, the parent company of Dish, announced in August that it would be shutting down parts of its open RAN network while continuing to run the 5G core. It plans to become a “hybrid” mobile network operator, where Dish operates portions of the network infrastructure like the network core and billing and provisioning while its MVNO partner AT&T provides base stations, radios, RAN software and spectrum frequencies.
As part of the deal with AT&T, EchoStar is selling about $23 billion worth of 3.45 GHz and 600 MHz spectrum licenses – a total of 50 MHz of spectrum nationwide spectrum – to AT&T.
Some analysts have speculated that the 600 MHz spectrum ultimately might end up in the hands of T-Mobile through a subsequent transaction, in part because AT&T currently doesn’t have any 600 MHz spectrum deployed. But Elbaz said the plan is for AT&T to purchase new 600 MHz radios and build it out.
Analysts on state of Open RAN
Asked if Dish’s exit puts a nail in the open RAN coffin, Senza Fili President Monica Paolini said no, it does not. Greenfield operators always face a challenging environment regardless of the technology they choose and many of them don’t succeed. In Dish’s case, its entire business proposition was problematic from the get-go.
In that sense, “I would not see it as evidence that open RAN is not a compelling or sustainable proposition,” she said.
Core Analysis CEO Patrick Lopez, who worked on open RAN when he was a VP at Telefonica in Spain from 2016-2019, agreed.
But open RAN isn’t going to be the single solution that replaces all the RAN out there. “It’s going to continue being one of the RAN options architecturally,” he said. “It’s going to continue in 5G and 6G, but it's not going to be the single or even the dominant option. I think there's a variety of RAN configurations for different purposes.”
To be sure, adoption of open RAN is much lower than initially expected. Paolini said that’s because the initial open RAN proposition was too narrow and didn’t meet the financial and operational needs of most operators and the capabilities of vendors, especially in terms of ensuring solid interoperability.
The solution? “Learn from past experience and broaden the scope of open RAN,” she said. “Make it truly open by allowing any type of multi-vendor arrangement, including single-vendor ones (like AT&T did initially). We might have lost a battle, but we can still win the war.”
Fierce Network is hosting a free virtual Open RAN Summit on September 16-17. Register here.