O-RAN Near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller Market Trends

Growth Drivers

• Growing Demand for an Advanced RAN Management – On account of the major radicalization in the telecom infrastructure, leading to a shift towards 5G networks, there is a need for faster internet connectivity, advanced technology and increased adoption of loT devices. The major challenges faced by the operators in telecom industry while managing RAN is the need for a better and much advanced RAN orchestration and management platforms. Telecom Company Ericsson, is a leading supporter of open-source initiatives like the O-RAN and encourage the industry alignment to Open sources to ensure better speed of adaptation and realization of values from the 5G platform. Ericsson Intelligent Open RAN Automation quotes a 60% reduction in network performance issues and 17% improved energy efficiency, with a 30% improvement in service availability currently.
• Surge in investment opportunities for 5G technology- 5G network infrastructure has been gradually laid out all around the world. This has led to increase in the investment of Telecom operators for this advanced network. For instance, Google joined O-RAN ALLIANCE and partnered with Ericsson to bring in cloud capabilities of Google to the 5G and help rearchitect O-RAN Networks.
• Increase in mobile internet penetration and mobile data consumption- According to the statistics by the International telecommunication Union, the number of internet users in the globe touched around 4 Billion by the end of 2019 and it’s also studies that 1/3^rd of the World population can access the 5G networks by 2025. This increase in mobile internet penetration and data consumption is anticipated to drive the market growth in forecast year.
• Rising Need of Telecom Operators to Lower Their Cost of Operations- An open platform lowers the hurdles of new vendors to enter the market and enables operators to deploy network components from a variety of suppliers, reducing the overall cost of ownership. It’s noted that total cost of ownership for traditional RAN accounts for 70% of mobile network cost. Therefore,  operators can save up to 50% by using O-RAN Frameworks.

Challenges

• Deployment and management issues of O-RAN Based Networks- O-RAN faces challenges in operations and maintenance. Multi-vendor ecosystem provides flexibility and also brings forth challenges in implementation. Currently only 35 active O-RAN deployments are done around the globe owing to the testing and management issues.
• Security threat of the O-RAN Networks- More vendors in the RAN poses security threat. Secure management interfaces cannot be implemented by all the vendors.
• Lack of awareness among people about the O-RAN Near-Real-Time RAN Intelligent Controller and the technology.