Open RAN ‘tanked’ in 2024, Dell’Oro says

The Open RAN market is seeing a second tough year

After starting off with rapid growth, Open RAN technology took a plunge during 2023 and has continued to struggle during the course of 2024, according to new analysis from Dell’Oro Group.

“2024 is so far not a great year from an Open RAN revenue perspective,” wrote Stephan Pongratz, Dell’Oro’s VP of RAN market research, in a blog post assessing the Open Radio Access Network market through the third quarter of this year.

The Open RAN market saw a “torrid pace” of growth as it got off the ground between 2019 through 2022, Pongratz pointed out. That was followed by a market decline of about half a billion dollars last year, amid an overall industry slow-down in network investments. The network market is still challenging, with Open RAN seeing an additional year-over-year decline of about 30% from the first quarter of this year through the third quarter, according to Dell’Oro’s tracking.

Meanwhile, virtualized RAN was down 15% from the first quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of this year.

However, Pongratz added, “the long-term trajectory is positive, but the short-term picture remains blurry.” If 5G network activity picks up in the U.S. and Japan, or if other modernization plans get announced that leverage the latest Open RAN interfaces, that would provide more slarity on the direction of the Open RAN market in the short term.

Still, Dell’Oro anticipates that Open RAN’s share of the 2024 RAN market will be in the mid-single-digits, and account for 8-10% of the overall revenues for combined propriety + Open RAN network technologies.

Dell’Oro’s numbers follow the same general trajectory as those of Mobile Experts, which released an Open RAN forecast in October which concluded that the technology was seeing “the most bizarre market growth profile ever seen in the wireless market” and that Open RAN deployments had “screeched to a halt during 2024.”

However, Mobile Experts also concluded that while greenfield O-RAN deployments were largely past, that O-RAN will regain its growth—just in a slightly different way, with brownfield deployments that take a single-software strategy, like AT&T is taking with multiple, open radio vendors and a foundation of Ericsson’s software.

A November report from Dell’Oro on the overall RAN market found that market conditions were “slowly improving but remain challenging,” with significant geographical differences in the state of the market. The RAN market has seen year-over-year declines for six consecutive quarters, which continued in the third quarter of 2024. According to Dell’Oro Group’s tracking, worldwide RAN revenues were down 10-20 percent year-over-year—still not quite as much as the Open RAN market.

Pongratz said at the time that in terms of the overall RAN market, operators were “adjusting the proportion” of their capex that would be dedicated to the RAN, and that the market was also being impacted by “tougher comparisons, excess capacity, monetization challenges, and capex fatigue.”

Dell’Oro expects to see modest recovery at low single-digit rates in the worldwide RAN market during 2025—with the exception of China, where the RAN market is expected to continue to see a decline.