Open RAN has had many dawns, but now a new market is currently rising, according to Sadayuki Abeta, CTO of OREX SAI, the NTT DoCoMo-NEC JV that has been formed to commercialise the integration, deployment and management of Open RAN networks outside of Japan.
Abeta said that governments and operators in South East Asia will drive a wave of volume Open RAN deployments, starting from late 2025, and hitting volume in 2026-2027.
Although Orex SAI is engaged in some European discussions, and despite some high profile RFIs, things there are moving slowly.
“We’ve seen four to five years of trials in Europe, but still very limited areas of commercial deployment,” Abeta said.
In addition some markets, such as in the US, are seeing operators choose to go with a single Open RAN vendor, something that Abeta said he does not “understand the meaning of.”
“So it seems OpenRAN is very slowly developing or deploying in the world.”
However, Abeta contrasts that with SE Asia, where OREX has been boosted by recent signs of progress in an arc of countries – Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, and The Philippines. OREX has recently press released a series of trial deployments in each of those countries, and Abeta said that these are being readied for transformation to commercial deployments.
That is being driven, he said, by governments and operators. Governments see the opportunity to meet their goals for digital transformation, and creating tech sector jobs via in-country development of telecoms capabilities. Operators see an alternative route for network expansion, driven by promises of a lower TCO and more flexible deployment options, away from the roadmaps of the major vendors.
“In most of these countries – excluding Singapore – 5G is not widely deployed outside the major cities,” he said, giving Open RAN an expansion opportunity. OREX is also looking closely at deploying in RAN sharing models, further helping with the network economics.
OREX markets Open RAN packages, which are pre-configured combinations of hardware, accelerator, cloud platform and vRAN software. Although it lists four such types on the NTT DoCoMo Open RAN website, Abeta said that some of these configurations have changed, recently, with new hardware partners.
Abeta conceded that OREX itself will not make much money acting as a reseller for the vendor products integrated within its packages. Instead, most of its money will come from integration and deployment services – acting as a System Integrator.
It also offers its own SMO solution, plus Non Real Time and Near Real Time RIC platforms, another target for revenue growth. Here Abeta said that incumbent operators are still showing reluctance to open up interfaces to enable the platform to manage multi-vendor networks consisting not just of Open RAN but legacy deployments. (As a related aside, Abeta said that the company had engaged in some initial talks with Deutsche Telekom regarding its requirement to build out an independent, automated RAN management capability by 2027.)
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Additionally, operators concerned often don’t have the resources and knowledge to integrate and deploy multi-vendor Open RAN networks. That’s where OREX wants to step in further, providing training and knowledge transfer to boost the internal technical and operational capacity of mobile operators.
However positive Abeta is, it’s apparent that, in fact, his timelines accord with the European markets he castigates. Pushing out volume deployment to 2026/27 puts it pretty much in line with the likes of Orange and Deutsche Telekom. The difference is that the European companies started their explorations longer ago, while Abeta is affording the S E Asian operators a quicker ramp-up time, and perhaps more interest in multi-vendor package.
And of course in many of those same markets, oprators are still choosing to invest heavily in the traditional vendors. Although some countries may seek to distance themselves, Huawei still dominates, along with Nokia and Ericsson. In Indonesia itself, Indosat Ooredoo, for example, has achieved a post-merger network integration and consolidation project using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei as prime 5G vendors. In Vietnam, telco Viettel has developed its own Open RAN platform based on Qualcomm chips and RAN software, but has also expanded its 5G network in a major way using Nokia and Ericsson.
However, Abeta believes OREX can scale Open RAN in those markets, and then leverage that in others.
“The focus on south east Asia is very attractive now. We are now discussing how to deploy commercially with operators, partners and governments. So this is the difference between and south east Asia – there is new demand coming from MNOs.”
