STL Partners has published a first attempt at establishing how much the O-RAN market is worth.
For their market forecast, STL Partners define O-RAN as “virtualised, disaggregated, open-interface architectures in the radio access network (RAN). The firm excludes single vendor deployments that are O-RAN or vRAN compliant.
Operators’ options
As mobile operators upgrade their 4G networks and invest in new 5G infrastructure, they can continue purchasing single vendor legacy RAN equipment or opt for multi-vendor open-standard O-RAN solutions.
Each telco will determine its O-RAN roadmap based on its specific circumstances (footprint, network evolution, rural coverage, regulatory pressure, etc).
STL defined four broad pathways for transitioning from legacy RAN/vRAN to O-RAN and categorised each of the top 40 mobile operators in one of the pathways, based on their announced or suspected O-RAN strategy.
Through telcos’ projected mobile CapEx and the pathway categorisation, STL Partners estimates that by 2026 annual sales of O-RAN active network elements (including equipment and software) will reach $12 billion, or 21% of all active RAN CapEx (excluding passive infrastructure).
By 2030, these will reach $43 billion and 76%, respectively.
More information here.