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The Open RAN market is unfolding exactly as Téral Research’s founder Stéphane Téral anticipated
For more than a decade, Open RAN has been pitched as a transformative force in mobile networks —more open, more flexible, and less vendor-locked. But its actual uptake has been the subject of persistent debate. Is adoption too slow? Or were expectations always misaligned? According to Stéphane Téral, founder of Téral Research, the market is unfolding exactly as he anticipated.
“You know, it was not meant to be … a fast adoption,” Téral said in an episode of Unmuted. While critics frame Open RAN’s trajectory as sluggish, he argued that those who have been close to the technology from the start recognize the current pace as normal. “The adoption is actually as expected for people like me, who have been in this Open RAN domain for a very long time.”
Téral traces the origins of today’s Open RAN movement back to early AT&T efforts around 2012 — Domain 2.0, disaggregation principles, and the eventual emergence of ONAP, the xRAN Alliance, and the O-RAN Alliance. By the time 5G contract cycles began in 2019, incumbent vendors were already locked in, leaving Open RAN out of the first global wave of deployments. But that moment has passed.
“Now we are at the end of this first 5G contract cycle, with more than 75% of them up for renewal. Now, there is actually Open RAN in every single RFP that we see,” he explained.
Japan, Téral noted, remains the clearest example of what Open RAN maturity looks like. Rakuten Mobile may have been the high-profile disruptor, but NTT DoCoMo’s quiet, steady implementation tells the real story: “They don’t even talk about Open RAN anymore. Why? Because it’s a reality.”
Integration: Still the hardest part
While Open RAN’s presence in RFPs is growing, real-world deployment challenges remain—especially integration across multi-vendor components.
“The integration is still a challenge,” Téral said. Operators fall along a spectrum: Some push as much integration as possible in-house, while others tap systems integrators or force vendors to work together. He recounted an example from Japan, where NTT DoCoMo insisted that major vendors collaborate whether they liked it or not: “Like it or not, you’re going to have to do it.”
Early integrators such as NEC and Fujitsu “are no longer doing good,” he added, noting that many operators are pulling integration responsibilities back under their own control.
The cost question: Expectations vs. reality
Cost savings have long been part of the Open RAN narrative, but Téral says they shouldn’t be the headline anymore. “Cost saving has slowly disappeared off the map as a chief driver,” he said. Instead, operators now must prioritize “scalability, agility, innovation, [and] flexibility.”
Integration complexity is the culprit behind rising operating costs. “Opex [is] going to the roof because of the integration cost,” he said, making true ROI a long-term prospect.
Looking ahead: From niche to normal
Despite challenges, Téral is clear: Open RAN is not destined to remain niche. “By 2030, 30% of all RAN deployments will be Open RAN,” he said, with the vast majority taking the form of virtualized Open vRAN architectures. “If you cannot offer Open RAN, you’re out, period.”
