Open RAN is on a roll, gaining support from the largest and most consequential association in the mobile industry. The GSMA and O-RAN Alliance linked up today to collaborate on products and services that adhere to the vision of open radio access networks (RAN).

Some of the largest members of the GSMA have been supporting open RAN initiatives for years, but this new tie-up builds a bridge between largely opposing forces that could transform the trajectory of open frameworks in telecommunications networks. 

The GSMA frames its support for open RAN around meeting the needs of enterprises. “When 5G reaches its potential it will become the first generation of mobile networks to have a bigger impact on enterprises than consumers,” Alex Sinclair, CTO at the GSMA, said in a statement. “The growth of the open networking ecosystem will be essential to meeting enterprise coverage and services needs in the 5G era.”

The new partnership comes just three weeks after the Open RAN Policy Coalition was formed with support from companies also actively involved with the GSMA and O-RAN Alliance. The new group lacked support from the three largest RAN vendors at the outset, but Nokia joined the collective earlier this week. 

The O-RAN Alliance also recently formed a collaborative agreement with the Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to align on the development of open RAN. Other ripples indicate that the tides could be shifting. 

More than two-thirds of 60 mobile network operators believe that open, cloud-native architecture is essential to their respective business models going forward, according to a recent survey commissioned by TIP and conducted by Analysys Mason. Disaggregation got the same nod from 85% of the operators surveyed, according to the research firm. 

Operator support for open RAN varies depending on the scale of each carrier’s network, Analysys Mason found. Roughly one-third of the tier-one operators surveyed expect to commercially deploy open RAN by the end of 2023. More than half of the tier-two operators surveyed are aiming for the same goal.

“Mobile network operators recognize that very different network architecture will be required to deliver the ambitious targets that they have for 5G,” analysts at the firm wrote. “It will be difficult for most mobile network operators to make the business case for 5G without these levels of cost reduction and service flexibility, and a radical new approach to network architecture is required to achieve them.”

Those findings jibe with the expectations of Altiostar CEO Ashraf Dahood. “There is now significant global movement to go to open RAN,” he told SDxCentral last month. “In the next three years, economic forces will drive operators to go to open RAN.”

Parallel Wireless CEO Steve Papa compared the adoption of open RAN to the changes that data centers went through after the turn of the millennium. “This is driving the need to move from costly, proprietary solutions to commercial off the shelf and open-based ones to create a broader vendor supply chain,” he said in a statement, referring to x86-based equipment. 

“Forecasts show 5G deployment costs falling 30% between now and 2022 if a network is built in the traditional way, but 50% if an open architecture is used,” Papa claimed. 

Andre Fuetsch, one of the most vocal operator executives supporting open frameworks, also applauded the alliance of the two bodies, calling it “exactly the sort of global effort that’s needed for everyone, operators and vendors alike, to succeed in this new generation.”

The EVP and CTO at AT&T, and chairman of the O-RAN Alliance, has long promoted efforts to reduce the power and control that infrastructure vendors have held over the telecom industry for decades.

“It’s going to break the vendor and technology lock in” and “open up a whole new level of interoperability,” he told SDxCentral last year. “Traditional areas of the network that have been controlled by a few are now being opened up to many."