Mavenir survey reveals 100% of mobile operators plan to implement OpenRAN

Richardson, Texas, October 4, 2019 – Mavenir, the industry’s only end-to-end Network Software Provider and a leader in accelerating software network transformation for communications service providers (CSPs), revealed results of a recent Mobile Operator survey on OpenRAN. The survey, conducted by mobile industry analyst and consultant firm Senza Fili, was meant to gauge intent and gather feedback from Service providers to better understand the need and requirements for OpenRAN products.

Key results were:

• 100% of operators are considering using OpenRAN in key scenarios
• 43% of respondents are open to replace current vendors
• Cost savings were mentioned by 25% of respondents as a reason to consider multiple vendors
• 84% operators will consider deploying RRUs and BBUs from different vendors in OpenRAN deployments.
• Lower cost radios seen as a key component to OpenRAN interface adoption

Mavenir is a leader supporting operator and ecosystem business transformation through OpenRAN adoption, as it will enable service providers with more flexibility in vendor selection, cost advantages (Capex/Opex) and future innovations. Mavenir has deployed the first OpenRAN in Brazil, which is a deployment that is truly open – defined as open software on open radio hardware, not a proprietary configuration.

Monica Paolini, Founder and President of Senza Fili said, "There was overwhelming response to the operator survey. The trend shows great interest in moving to OpenRAN sooner rather than later."

“Mavenir has been a pioneer of OpenRAN and open interfaces,” said John Baker, SVP Mavenir. “We’ve been participating in and driving OpenRAN business transformation so the results from this survey are very encouraging. For the first time in many years, opportunities for new suppliers in what has been a closed ecosystem, are now opening and operators are actively making this change happen.”

An objective of the OpenRAN initiative is to migrate and virtualize RAN functions on to industry standard servers. Mavenir works with Intel on deriving their OpenRAN products based on contributions from the Intel FlexRAN reference architecture. The FlexRAN reference architecture is based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to enable the highly optimized OpenRAN workloads to run on the Intel architecture cores with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 instructions for baseband processing.