Mulit-vendor Open RAN stalls as Echostar/Dish shuts down it’s 5G network leaving Mavenir in the lurch
Last week’s announcement that Echostar/ Dish Network will sell $23 billion worth of spectrum to AT&T was very bad news for Mavenir. As a result of that deal, Echostar’s 5G Open RAN network, running partly on Mavenir’s software, is to be decommissioned. Dish Network had been constructing a fourth nationwide U.S. mobile network with new Open RAN suppliers – one of the only true multi-vendor Open RANs worldwide.
Credit: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy Stock Photo
Echostar’s decision to shut down its 5G network marks a sorry end for what is surely the world’s biggest multivendor open RAN and will have ramifications for the entire industry. “If you look at all the initiatives, what the US government did or in general, they are the only ones who actually spent a good chunk of money to really support open RAN architecture,” said Pardeep Kohli, the CEO of Mavenir, one of the vendors involved in the Dish Network project. “So now the question is where do you go from here?”
As part of its original set of updates on 5G network plans, Dish revealed it would host its 5G core – the part that will survive the spectrum sale – in the public cloud of AWS. And the hyperscaler’s data facilities have also been used for RAN software from Mavenir installed on servers known as central units.
Open RAN enters is in the fronthaul interface between Mavenir’s DU software and radios provided by Japan’s Fujitsu. Its ability to connect its software to another company’s radios validates Mavenir’s claims to be an open RAN vendor, says Kohli. While other suppliers boast compatibility with open RAN specifications, commercial deployments pairing vendors over this interface remain rare.
Mavenir has evidently been frustrated by the continued dominance of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, whose combined RAN market share grew from 75.1% in 2023 to 77.5% last year, according to research from Omdia, an Informa company. Dish Network alone would not have made a sufficient difference for Mavenir and other open RAN players, according to Kohli. “It helped us come this far,” he said. “Now it’s up to how far other people want to take it.” A retreat from open RAN would, he thinks, be a “bad outcome for all the western operators,” leaving them dependent on a Nordic duopoly in countries where Chinese vendors are now banned.
“If they (telcos) don’t support it (multi-vendor OpenRAN), and other people are not supporting it, we are back to a Chinese world and a non-Chinese world,” he said. “In the non-Chinese world, you have Ericsson and Nokia, and in the Chinese world, it’s Huawei and ZTE. And that’s going to be a pretty bad outcome if that’s where it ends up.”
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Open RAN x-U.S.:
Outside the U.S., the situation is no better for OpenRAN. Only Japan’s Rakuten and Germany’s 1&1 have attempted to build a “greenfield” Open RAN from scratch. As well as reporting billions of dollars in losses on network deployment, Rakuten has struggled to attract customers. It owns the RAN software it has deployed but counts only 1&1 as a significant customer. And Rakuten’s original 4G rollout was not based on the industry’s open RAN specifications, according to critics. “They were not pure,” said Mavenir’s Kohli.
Plagued by delays and other problems, 1&1’s rollout has been a further bad advert for Open RAN. For the greenfield operators, the issue is not the maturity of open RAN technology. Rather, it is the investment and effort needed to build any kind of new nationwide telecom network in a country that already has infrastructure options. And the biggest brownfield operators, despite professing support for open RAN, have not backed any of the the new entrants.
RAN Market Concentration:
- Stefan Pongratz, an analyst with Dell’Oro, found that five of six regions he tracks are today classed as “highly concentrated,” with an HHI score of more than 2,500. “This suggests that the supplier diversity element of the open RAN vision is fading,” wrote Pongratz in a recent blog.
- A study from Omdia (owned by Informa), shows the combined RAN market share of Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia grew from 75.1% in 2023 to 77.5% last year. The only significant alternative to the European and Chinese vendors is Samsung, and its market share has shrunk from 6.1% to 4.8% over this period.
Concentration would seem to be especially high in the U.S., where Ericsson now boasts a RAN market share of more than 50% and generates about 44% of its sales (the revenue contribution of India, Ericsson’s second-biggest market, was just 4% for the recent second quarter). That’s partly because smaller regional operators previously ordered to replace Huawei in their networks spent a chunk of the government’s “rip and replace” funds on Ericsson rather than open RAN, says Kohli. Ironically, though, Ericsson owes much of the recent growth in its U.S. market share to what has been sold as an open RAN single vendor deal with AT&T [1.]. Under that contract, it is replacing Nokia at a third of AT&T’s sites, having already been the supplier for the other two thirds.
Note 1. In December 2023, AT&T awarded Ericsson a multi-year, $14 billion Open RAN contract to serve as the foundation for its open network deployment, with a goal of having 70% of its wireless traffic on open platforms by late 2026. That large, single-vendor award for the core infrastructure was criticized for potentially undermining the goal of Open RAN which was to encourage competition among multiple network equipment and software providers. AT&T’s claim of a mulit-vendor network turned out to be just a smokescreen. Fujitsu/1Finity supplied third-party radios used in AT&T’s first Open RAN call with Ericsson.
Indeed, AT&T’s open RAN claims have been difficult to take seriously, especially since it identified Mavenir as a third supplier of radio units, behind Ericsson and Japan’s Fujitsu, just a few months before Mavenir quit the radio unit market. Mavenir stopped manufacturing and distributing Open RAN radios in June 2025 as part of a financial restructuring and a shift to a software-focused business model.
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Arguably, Kohli describes Echostar/ Dish Network as the only U.S. player that was spending “a good chunk of money to really support open RAN architecture.”
Ultimately, he thinks the big U.S. telcos may come to regret their heavier reliance on the RAN gear giants. “It may look great for AT&T and Verizon today, but they’ll be funding this whole thing as a proprietary solution going forward because, really, there’s no incentive for anybody else to come in,” he said.
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References:
https://www.lightreading.com/open-ran/echostar-rout-leaves-its-open-ran-vendors-high-and-dry
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