Juniper Research reckons ‘O-RAN’ spending will increase over 5x by 2029

Another day, another bullish mobile industry forecast, this time anticipating a boom in spending on Open RAN despite a stagnant broader market.

Juniper Research release a press release to promote its new Global Operator O-RAN Strategies, 2024-2029 report. The headline data point is that ‘annual operator investment into O-RAN (Open Radio Access Networks) will reach $11 billion in 2029; rising from $2 billion in 2024.’ So that’s 5.5x growth over five years at a CAGR of over 40%. Contrast that with a recent forecast by another reputable analyst firm – Dell’Oro – that reckons total global RAN revenues will actually decline over next five years.

The press release didn’t offer much in terms of rationale or methodology and we were unable to access the link to a free extract offered at time of writing. It did, however, speak at length on the topic of ‘AI-based traffic steering’, which it identified as ‘a crucial service enabled by O-RAN.’

“Operators must leverage AI-based traffic steering to improve connectivity services, such as enhanced mobile broadband, with network traffic generated by these connections being given priority steering to the base station offering the lowest latency to maximise the value proposition for users,” explained research author Alex Webb.

The reason we will need this new technology, apparently unique to Open RAN, is that Juniper also reckons ‘cellular data usage will more than double over the next four years; owing to the expansion of new 5G broadband services, and the use of 5G for the Internet of Things.’ In this respect it seems to broadly agree with the GSMA and Ericsson, who also anticipate booming mobile data consumption. You can read our critique of those forecasts here.

The clear inference from Juniper’s forecast is that Open RAN is going to rapidly replace legacy tech on the overall RAN market. The current market size is estimated to be around $40 billion annually, so this report reckons Open RAN’s share of it will increase from 5% to 28% in five years. All the signs are that Open RAN specialists are struggling, so this growth will have to come from the incumbent big vendors.

Which brings us to deals such as AT&T’s with Ericsson, which has been branded as Open RAN. In effect this seems to be about terms such as ‘compliance’ and ‘compatibility’. In other words not necessarily unique Open RAN kit, probably just software tweaks.

So, our conclusion from the details of Juniper’s report we were able to access is that a quarter of RAN kit sold in 2029 will be called Open RAN (or O-RAN) but that relies on a fairly broad definition of the subcategory. Furthermore, the presumed driver of this transformation is booming mobile data traffic growth, a forecast that is also built on some shaky assumptions.