Meanwhile Vodafone Group has joined the AI-RAN Alliance, which has not made much noise or demonstrable progress since it was formed last year and is low on operator members
A new AI RAN Advanced Research Report published by Dell’Oro Group predicts AI RAN will account for about a third of the RAN market by 2029. In the near term, the sector will concentrate on Distributed-RAN (D-RAN– see diagram below), single-purpose deployments and 5G, the report states.
Source: p17, Open RAN – Evolving to fulfil its promise, Research Report commissioned and published by Mobile Europe, summer 2024. Download free by regisering here.
Key conclusions from the Dell’Oro report are that the base case for AI RAN is not a growth vehicle rather, over time, operators will incorporate more virtualisation, intelligence, automation and O-RAN into their RAN roadmaps. Hence AI RAN is a crucial technology/tool for operators.
Dell’Oro also reckons that existing RAN radio and baseband suppliers are well-positioned in the initial AI-RAN phase, driven primarily by AI-for-RAN upgrades that leverage existing hardware.
Stefan Pongratz, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group, stated, “Near-term priorities are more about efficiency gains than new revenue streams. There is strong consensus that AI RAN can improve the user experience, enhance performance, reduce power consumption, and play a critical role in the broader automation journey.
“Unsurprisingly, however, there is greater skepticism about AI’s ability to reverse the flat revenue trajectory that has defined operators throughout the 4G and 5G cycles.”
Vodafone joins AI-RAN Alliance
Vodafone Group has joined the AI-RAN Alliance, which says it has more than 100 members, but few of them are operators. Turkcell is the only other telco from the MEA region. The alliance was announced with considerable fanfare at MWC 2024 by 12 organisations – AWS, Arm, DeepSig, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Northeastern University, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, SoftBank and T-Mobile USA. It published a white paper on its Vision and Mission in December.
Vodafone is seen as something as a trailblazer in RAN, as one of the biggest proponents of Open RAN. In a press statement, Francisco Martin, Head of Open RAN at Vodafone, said, “Vodafone is committed to using AI to optimise and enhance the performance of our radio access networks. Running AI and RAN workloads on shared infrastructure boosts efficiency, while integrating AI and generative applications over RAN enables new real-time capabilities at the network edge.”
Surpassing a 100-member milestone is clearly a big deal: “This milestone underscores the global momentum behind advancing AI for RAN, AI and RAN, and AI on RAN,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chair of the AI-RAN Alliance and Principal Fellow at SoftBank Corp.’s Research Institute of Advanced Technology. “Our members are pioneering how artificial intelligence can be deeply embedded into radio access networks — from foundational research to real-world deployment — to create intelligent, adaptive, and efficient wireless systems.”
