AT&T CTO: The survival of Open RAN needs to be supported by traditional operators. News on September 15th, Beijing time (Yue Ming) As EchoStar (Dish) announced that it will gradually shut down its Open RAN network, does this mean the end of Open RAN? Yigal Elbaz, AT&T senior vice president and network CTO, firmly denied this. In fact, he told the foreign media Fierce Network during the Mobile Future Forward conference held recently that the only way for Open RAN to continue is to rely on established operators like AT&T, rather than greenfield operators like Dish. I have emphasized many times in the past: The key to the survival and development of Open RAN lies in whether traditional established operators can achieve large-scale deployment. He said. This answer is completely expected for those who have continued to pay attention to the development of Open RAN in recent years. AT&T made this clear when it reached a 14 billion multi-year Open RAN contract with Ericsson in 2023. In addition to AT&T, its Open RAN network industry also uses other vendors, such as Fujitsu's 1Finity unit, Dell and Intel. Yigal Elbaz insists AT&T got what they wanted with Ericsson - and that Ericsson was as open as it expected. They re exactly as open as I want them to be, he said. Yigal Elbaz also paid tribute to greenfield operators, including Dish, and affirmed their efforts in building networks based on Open RAN architecture. The problem is that there are only two or three such companies in the world and they are not large enough to keep the ecosystem functioning, he added. Dish parent company EchoStar announced in August that it would gradually shut down part of its Open RAN network while retaining 5G core network operations. The company plans to transform into a hybrid mobile network operator: Dish is responsible for operating some network infrastructure, such as the core network, billing and configuration services, while its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) partner AT&T is responsible for providing base stations, wireless equipment, RAN software and spectrum resources. Under the agreement with AT&T, EchoStar will sell 3.45GHz and 600MHz spectrum licenses worth approximately 23 billion to AT&T - a total of 50MHz of nationwide spectrum resources. Although some analysts speculate that the 600MHz spectrum may be transferred to T-Mobile through subsequent transactions (because AT&T is not currently deploying this frequency band), Yigal Elbaz made it clear that AT&T plans to purchase new 600MHz wireless equipment and conduct network construction. In response to a question about whether Dish's withdrawal indicates the failure of Open RAN, Senza Fili President Monica Paolini said this is not the case. She pointed out that no matter what technology is adopted, greenfield operators always face severe challenges, and most of them fail to succeed. In the case of Dish, there were fundamental problems with its business model from the beginning. In that sense, I don't think this can be taken as evidence that Open RAN lacks traction or sustainability. Core Analysis CEO Patrick Lopez agreed. Patrick Lopez was involved in the development of Open RAN while serving as Vice President of Telefonica from 2016 to 2019. He pointed out: Open RAN will not become the only solution to replace all existing RAN. From an architectural level, it will continue to exist as one of the RAN options. This trend will continue in the 5G and 6G era, but it will not become the only option, or even the dominant option. I think there will be diverse RAN configurations for different needs in the future. It must be admitted that the adoption rate of Open RAN is far lower than originally expected. Monica Paolini believes that the root cause is that the original Open RAN solution was too narrow and failed to meet the financial operational needs of most operators and the capability requirements of equipment manufacturers, especially in ensuring reliable interoperability. The solution is to learn from past experience and expand the scope of Open RAN. Be truly open by allowing any type of multi-vendor architecture, including the single-vendor model initially adopted by AT&T, she concluded