Deutsche Telekom’s Thomas Lips has been appointed chair of the O-RAN Alliance, replacing Abdurazak Mudesir in the role.

Lips, who is SVP of radio access network (RAN) disaggregation and enablement at Deutsche Telekom (DT), took up the position at the end of August. Mudesir, who is group CTO at DT, spent a year in the role and is due to take up a position on DT’s board beginning next month.

Lips had represented the carrier’s open RAN efforts with the Alliance, of which he is listed as a founding member on its website. His previous roles include CTIO of both DT IoT and T-Mobile Poland (where he was also a board member). Lips took up his current SVP role at DT in 2022.

“Under my chairmanship, the O-RAN Alliance will remain committed to its mission to transform the RAN to be open, intelligent, virtualized, and fully interoperable,” Lips noted in a statement. “We will focus on priority areas to support large-scale open RAN deployments by operators worldwide. A key goal is to provide a framework for AI-enabled open RAN, creating new opportunities for intelligent and autonomous networks.”

DT co-founded the O-RAN Alliance in 2018 in an effort to drive the O-RAN framework. Today, it is comprised of more than 300 mobile operators, vendors, and academic institutions, including AT&T, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SoftBank, Verizon, and Vodafone.

Lips takes on the role as open RAN acceptance by the wider market remains a hard sell. Dell’Oro Group recently reported that revenues related to the sale of open RAN equipment plunged in 2024, while complexity concerns have been raised about the offering concerning interoperability and performance.

There are also security concerns with open RAN, with Analysys Mason telling SDxCentral that an increased number of open interfaces can pose considerable security challenges.