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 licenses to AT&T was very bad news for Mavenir. As a result of that deal, Dish Network’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 very sad end for the world’s largest 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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Spark New Zealand completes 5G SA core network trials with AWS and Mavenir software
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Pardeep Kohli, Mavenir’s long-serving CEO, puts revenues last year at about $650 million and says 90% of that was earned in the markets for core network software and Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) functions.
In the RAN, sales would have been split between radios and baseband software, which Mavenir also continues to develop. EchoStar’s recent move to sell spectrum and decommission its network is undoubtedly a blow – the US operator was probably Mavenir’s biggest RAN software customer. But that move will have a relatively small impact on Mavenir’s headline sales, just as the hardware exit frees up resources for software investment.
Kohli has ambitious plans, too. And they start with an overhaul of Mavenir’s core network portfolio that is already underway. For years, telcos have deployed dozens of separate functions, each catering to a specific network need. But this proliferation of software has brought complexity for telcos, in Mavenir’s view. “We actually want to change the whole way of doing the core,” said Kohli.
Agentic AI is intended to be more autonomous than Generative AI, with agents handling specific tasks without the need for human intervention and even liaising with other AI systems. Mavenir’s vision entails substituting agentic AI for multiple separate functions.
“In core today there’s IMS and messaging and voicemail and all that, and you could theoretically replace it all with an AI agent,” said Kohli. “I don’t need 15 different functions. This could all be one AI agent, a superintelligent AI agent for all the core applications. So, we’re going to reformat our core network to be AI-native.”
Mavenir has modified its RAN pitch, positioning itself as a software layer that can support operators with the management and integration of multivendor networks. As in the core, AI is an integral element of its RAN software plans. “I think if AI had happened before open RAN, open RAN would have succeeded,” said Kohli in a gloomy assessment of the concept’s status today.
“Part of the trick was how do you put these things together and how do you automate it, and that, people thought, was very complicated,” he said. Using digital twins and AI, Mavenir now believes it can help address that problem by showing an operator what the impact would be of swapping an Ericsson radio for a Nokia one in part of the footprint. “If it can all be tested, verified and validated before you go and deploy it, the game will change,” said Kohli. “We are now very focused on how to become a horizontal AI RAN player that’s independent of which baseband and radio player there is.”
https://www.lightreading.com/ai-machine-learning/after-radio-exit-mavenir-kicks-off-ai-overhaul-of-core-and-ran
“No, open RAN is not dead at all,” said Tommi Uitto, the president of Nokia’s mobile networks business group, during a press conference at the Finnish company’s futuristic new research and development campus in Oulu earlier this month. “I want to say that we are fully committed to open RAN. We are fully committed to cloud RAN. There are more than Ericsson and Nokia.”
Hardly any entirely new builds, dubbed “greenfield” networks, have materialized since the birth of the O-RAN Alliance. And the biggest, owned by Echostar in the US, is to be decommissioned following the company’s multibillion-dollar sale of spectrum licenses to AT&T and SpaceX. Echostar’s move is a huge blow to Mavenir and other open RAN suppliers involved in the rollout.
The bigger problem has been the apparent lack of interest among the world’s incumbent “brownfield” operators. Nearly all have stuck with traditional vendors including Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia. Last year, data from Omdia (a Light Reading sister company) showed the RAN market share of those three companies had grown from 75.1% in 2023 to 77.4%. The world’s largest open RAN deployment by a brownfield operator is AT&T’s in the US – and it is controversial. While AT&T claims to be using products compliant with O-RAN Alliance specifications, almost all of them are provided by Ericsson.
Omdia gave Samsung a 4.8% share of the RAN market last year, making it the world’s fifth-biggest vendor by sales, behind Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and ZTE.
Japan’s NEC and Fujitsu, the only other companies tracked by Omdia, had shares of 0.9% and 0.5% respectively.
In April, Fujitsu span off its network assets into a new business called 1FINITY and predicted that network sales would fall 17% in the current fiscal year. NEC warned in July that revenues at its telecom services unit would fall 12.6% in the current quarter and that its operating profit would drop 31%.
Both have endured the harsh RAN conditions under the protective wings of huge electronics companies generating tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues. Startups and much smaller organizations like Mavenir have not had that luxury and are not even regarded today as viable contenders by some of the biggest telcos.
“Small vendors of the ecosystem will have a role to play, but more in indoor areas and maybe some neutral host situations,” said Laurent Leboucher, the group chief technology officer of France’s Orange, at this year’s MWC Barcelona. “The really big open competition to replace and transform the existing mobile network is still with just a few players.”
https://www.lightreading.com/open-ran/nokia-mobile-boss-says-open-ran-is-not-dead-amid-duopoly-fears