Open radio access networks (RAN) remain a work in progress technically and mentally for mobile operators, with the former’s robust progress slowly squeezing out concerns around the latter. However, a bigger challenge could come from the person who signs the checks.

Amy Zwarico, director for cybersecurity in AT&T’s Chief Security Office, said during this week’s Telco Cloud and Edge Forum 2023 virtual event that financial concerns will be key to the broader adoption of open RAN technology.

“The other piece that we can't overlook is that it will be a financial decision,” Zwarico said in relation to challenges in open RAN architectures gaining greater market share at operators. “When you can do a cloud-native RAN cheaper than the current way we deploy RAN, it will be adopted. If it's more expensive to run, unfortunately, the CFOs of companies don't really think that cool technology is just good enough to pay extra for.”

AT&T has been at the forefront of the industry’s open and virtualized RAN (vRAN) work, but broader market deployments remain limited. Analysts have seen modest open RAN usage in commercial deployments but have noted many have been from a single vendor.

“Early adopters are embracing the movement toward more openness but at the same time there is more uncertainty when it comes to the early majority operator and the implications for the broader RAN supplier landscape now with non-multi-vendor deployments driving a significant portion of the year-to-date open RAN market,” Dell’Oro Group VP Stefan Pongratz noted in a recent report.

The analyst firm in a more recent report predicted momentum would continue this year, though it expects revenue growth will slow “reflecting a more challenging comparison with the early adopters.”

Vendors also remain cautiously optimistic of that momentum.

“There’s a long tail to these things to where the markets or the operators themselves don’t move as fast as we would like to, and I think one of the prime markets we anticipated more success early on and we’re finally starting to see dividends has been in Europe,” Derek Johnston, head of marketing and 5G business development at Samsung Networks, recently told SDxCentral. “I think that’s an area where we’re excited about the prospects, and my hope is that we prevail in a lot of those operators that are looking at [open RAN] as an option and look for us for that journey.”

Mark Poletti, director of mobile networks at CableLabs, built on Zwarico’s comments during the same panel discussion by noting open RAN adoption will also have to work through operator purchasing cycles.

“If you consider operators having a three to five year purchasing cycle of infrastructure, it's maybe the second year into the 5G purchasing cycle, just for argument's sake,” Poletti said. “While this is happening, I'm waiting for the cycle to come up where they make another purchasing decision. Open RAN, and cloud-native RAN, and cloud-native cores are all progressing. The one argument could be made to say that by the time that cycle ends, and operators are starting to look at new opportunities and new ways to deploy, all the benefits that we talked about with cloud-native RAN … will be mature enough for the operators and have enough diversity where an operator will be able to pick and choose which ones will fit into their next cycle of purchasing.”

Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile US, echoed this sentiment during an interview at the recent MWC Barcelona 2023 event. He explained the carrier’s lack of open RAN depth was due to timing, noting the technology lacked maturity when the carrier kicked off its expansive network upgrade program.

“For us, we didn’t go down an open RAN path when we made our big vendor decisions three years ago,” Ray said. “The pace and scale that we were moving on, features and capabilities we needed, the ecosystem just was not ready. And the O-RAN guys will tell you that.”

Those RAN decisions involved five-year contracts signed in early 2021 with Ericsson and Nokia to supply 5G RAN equipment for T-Mobile US’ $40 billion network upgrade. Those vendors have lagged the broader ecosystem in commercializing open RAN equipment.

However, Ray did preface his comments by stating, “I think the ecosystem’s maturing.”

“We’ve made massive investments into single RAN in our network environment, and it’s not like we’re repeating that soon,” Ray said. “But clearly, we’re evaluating continually open RAN opportunities. We believe that the ecosystem will be stronger with open RAN. But there isn’t a deployment thing that T-Mobile US is doing now.”

That timing could also be impacted by a broader operator push toward slowing capex over the next several years. Operator executives have been vocal in guiding toward lower capex spending in an attempt to start squeezing profits out of their initial 5G investments.

AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh explained during a recent investor conference that the carrier plans to slash capex from a high of around $24 billion this year to around $20 billion starting in 2024. He said the main drivers for that will be tapering down spend on its C-band spectrum deployment to support its 5G network and on its fiber deployment.

“We’ve got to make our capital dollars stretch a bit further, operationally, with our wireless build, which we are seeing in better than expected C-band coverage performance and our wireless investment last year,” McElfresh said. “All of this goes into our ability to get better return on a lower capital number next year.”

AT&T’s capex plans mirror those of rival Verizon, which is guiding its capex down from a high of $23.1 billion last year to support its own C-band deployment, to $17 billion in capex for 2024.

This timing could push broader open RAN deployments toward 5G-Advanced upgrades or even further out toward 6G deployments later this decade.