Open RAN Market Status and Outlook

November 30, 2021

Moderated by
Gabriel Brown, Senior Principal Analyst, Mobile Networks, Heavy Reading

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 Agenda
11:00 AM ET – Opening Remarks
Gabriel Brown, Senior Principal Analyst, Mobile Networks, Heavy Reading

11:10 AM ET – Service Provider Keynote

Dr Chih-Lin I, CMCC Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile

11:25 AM ET – Platinum Sponsor Keynote

Harpinder Matharu, Senior Director Technical Marketing, Xilinx

11:35 AM ET – Panel & Audience Questions

Haseeb Akhtar, Head of End-to-End Network Evolution, Ericsson North America
Rajesh Gangadhar, CTO & CPO – Access Solutions, STL
Gilles Garcia, Senior Director, Business Lead Wired and Wireless, Xilinx
Dr Chih-Lin I, CMCC Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile

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 Entering 3-operator markets;
Market Activity (I) MVNO agreements

2 million subs (June 2021) 4 million subs, >30K sites Plan to launch (now Q1 Plan to launch 2022
Telefonica, Meta (October 2021) 2022)

2,700 UK sites by 2027 50% radio network growth O-RAN commercially Ambition: deploy only O-RAN
(underway) based on Open RAN by 2025 deployable from 2023 compliant RAN from 2025

European
Operator MoU
Deployments live in 3 cities

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 Market Activity (II)

15 qualified vendors (RU & DU) Multi-vendor vRAN for 5G

5G O-RAN Ecosystem (OREC) mMIMO commercial 2H 2022

Focused on C-Band
RAN-optimized silicon RAN on public cloud
O-RAN DU SoCs (5 vendors) Private enterprise &
RF SoCs (n vendors) public wide-area RANs
Large R&D commitment

O-RAN in-building 2022 mMIMO 5G vRAN trial

O-RAN “compliant” 2021 O-RAN “compliant” 2021

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 Technology Maturity
In terms of readiness for commercial deployment, how mature do you believe open RAN
products and architectures are today? (n=80–82)

Overall system performance 18% 45% 30% 6%

Feature parity with integrated products 11% 51% 30% 7%

Security robustness 9% 55% 35% 1%

Open Fronthaul integration 9% 63% 29%

Open SMO integration 14% 53% 30% 4%

Cloud Native infrastructure readiness 16% 54% 28% 1%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Mature for scale deployments Close to mature for scale deployments

Promising but not ready for scale deployment Far from mature for scale deployments

Source: Heavy Reading’s 2021 Open RAN Operator Survey (October 2021)

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 Global RAN Market Forecast
• How many sites, base stations, and
Global RAN Equipment Forecast radios are deployed worldwide?
(~$45 billion in 2021) ― Hard to determine!
50 ― ~7 million physical cell sites
worldwide*
― ~10 million logical sites*
40 ― ~1.5 million outdoor /macro 3-
sector cell site deployments
per year (inc. refreshes)*
30 ― Many sites are multi band and
$ Billions

multi RAT
― Small cell volumes continue to
20 grow, especially indoors (>2
million units per year)
• RAN is a high volume, advanced
10 technology market
• If you have insight into RAN unit
10% volumes, please get in touch!
0 • *Source: Heavy Reading estimates
2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025
2G/3G LTE 5G
Open vRAN forecast definition:
Virtualized DU and multi-vendor DU-RU
Source: Omdia (Global RAN Forecast, Q3 2021)

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 But Open Changes RAN…
•Open RAN = Next-gen RAN?

•Can Open RAN be the best RAN?

•Or not…?

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 Operator Keynote
Dr Chih-Lin I, CMCC Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile

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 Sponsor Keynote
Harpinder Matharu, Senior Director Technical Marketing, Xilinx

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 Panel Session
• Haseeb Akhtar, Head of End-to-End Network Evolution, Ericsson North America
• Rajesh Gangadhar, CTO & CPO – Access Solutions, STL
• Gilles Garcia, Sr. Director Business Lead Wired and Wireless, Xilinx
• Dr Chih-Lin I, CMCC Chief Scientist of Wireless Technologies, China Mobile

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 Progress to Date
• How should we assess the progress of Open RAN to date?

• What is the medium term (3-year) outlook?

• What is the long term (5+ years) outlook?

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 Open RAN Use Cases
• Which use-case will drive scale into open RAN?

―Natural course of network refresh

―To add capacity (e.g. new bands) to existing sites

―New deployment scenarios (e.g. rural)

―To accelerate a vendor swap

―Private networks, campus networks, and venue networks

―Other?
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 Open RAN Performance
• How likely is it that Open RAN solutions will match or exceed the
performance (density, power, cost, etc.) of single-vendor
integrated RAN systems in the next three years?

―For high capacity sites – e.g. multi-band macro sites with large
bandwidth, massive MIMO, etc.?

―For mid-tier sites – e.g. for dual-and triple-band sites with 4x4 MIMO?

―For lower tiers sites – e.g. 2x2 or 4x4 MIMO with one or two 20MHz
carriers?

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 Thank You.
brown@heavyreading.com
@gabeuk

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