Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu, Rakuten and Mavenir continued to lead the still-nascent open radio access network (RAN) market through the first quarter of the year, though market trackers cited a slowdown in segment growth coming on the heels of a strong 2022.

Dell’Oro Group noted that open RAN revenues increased between 10% and 20% during the first quarter of the year, which was down from the more than doubling in revenues that occurred in 2022. Virtualized RAN (vRAN) showed a bit more growth in the latest quarter, with market revenues increasing between 20% and 30% year over year.

Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral that the markets continue to be dominated by a handful of operators, which causes an oversized influence on the market.

“The reality is that there is just a couple of large operators right now that are driving the market, both in open RAN and vRAN, and they are slowing down [their investments] right now,” Pongratz said, adding that this is seen by operators slowing down their 5G deployment investments.

Analysys Mason, in a recent report, cited an outside influence from operators like Rakuten Mobile in Japan and Dish Network in the United States. However, both are greenfield operators with limited overall market power.

LightCounting Market Research came to a similar conclusion, noting a handful of open RAN operators – Dish, Rakuten Mobile and some Rakuten Symphony customers – “kept the market flat year over-year and produced double-digit sequential growth.”

Dell’Oro Group found that Samsung, NEC, Fujitsu, Rakuten Symphony and Mavenir were the top open RAN revenue generators over the past several quarter. Samsung is notably the only open RAN vendor that also gained a spot on Dell’Oro Group’s more broadly focused traditional RAN leadership board, placing No. 5 globally and No. 4 outside of China.

Despite the flattening, Pongratz said he is keeping his full-year prediction that open RAN equipment will account for between 6% and 10% of the total RAN market by the end of 2023.

“It is worth keeping in mind that our current 2023 revenue outlook for open RAN is roughly two-times larger than the original open RAN 2023 projections we outlined back with our first open RAN forecast published in 2020,” Pongratz added. “So there is no doubt that open RAN is, from our perspective, accelerating at a much faster pace than initially expected, even with the slower [year-over-year] growth rates in [the first quarter].”

Looking ahead, Pongratz noted North America and Asia-Pacific remain open RAN market drivers, with Europe starting to gain traction. “They are very proactive when it comes to talking about open RAN, but uptake has been slower,” he said of that region.

Analysys Mason conducted its own survey of 75 operators, which found more than 80% do not expect to implement multivendor open RAN in the urban macro network until at least 2026.

“That leaves a hiatus during which operators cannot achieve the supply chain disruption and cost savings that they were targeting from open RAN, and challenger vendors cannot generate significant revenue,” Caroline Gabriel, research director at Analysys Mason, wrote.

Rakuten’s Amin recently said his company’s open RAN system was at near software feature parity with already deployed network systems. This is important for operators as they look to further migrate their current networks toward an open RAN architecture.

Amin said this is a “very big inflection point for us where we will be at feature parity with all legacy software features that exist in brownfield operators. This is really very exciting, and this is what we’ve been focused on over the last year to enable brownfield deployment in commercial environments.”

Mavenir scooped up $100 million in new funding for its open RAN efforts, which President and CEO Pardeep Kohli in a statement said would be used to “accelerate our capabilities in automation, sustainability and use of [artificial intelligence] as we enable our customers to efficiently deploy and operate open RAN-based end-to-end cloud-native networks.”

Those advances are feeding into growing operator interest.

Adam Koeppe, SVP of technology planning at Verizon, recently told SDxCentral that the carrier’s vRAN deployment was rolling toward 20,000 commercial sites by 2025. Those sites allow Verizon to remotely send updates as opposed to having to physically provide those updates at each site.

However, Koeppe did note the carrier will have to differentiate its vRAN work between equipment supplied by its different vendors.

The carrier is initially relying exclusively on equipment provided by Samsung as part of a blockbuster deal signed in mid-2020, which saw Verizon bypass long-time vendor Nokia. Verizon is also planning to start layering in vRAN equipment from Ericsson.

Verizon's Koeppe also stated that it remains “early days” in open RAN but that the carrier was still “working down” that path.

“We’re particularly focused on the interfaces between different functions on the radio access network,” Koeppe said of Verizon’s open RAN work. “We want to ensure that if a supplier makes a radio unit that’s best in class, and I have distributed unit software from another supplier that’s best in class, the interface between those two is common and open so that I can mix-and-match to best in class suppliers if they may be different.”

Koeppe’s sentiment was similar to that from T-Mobile US’ former technology chief Neville Ray, who told SDxCentral at the recent MWC Barcelona 2023 event that the carrier continues to monitor the open RAN ecosystem and efforts around the O-RAN Alliance.

“We’re trying to understand, make sure the various issues that we’ve seen, and we’ve seen starting to mature through O-RAN, are getting resolved. And I think there’s progress,” Ray said. “I think we all know that will reduce over time. But there are some good, strong U.S. companies in the space, which I think is very healthy. I’m very pragmatic about what we do and how we do it. O-RAN timing didn’t align with what we did. But going forward, we’ll see where we go.”