"Innovation and Reality" vs. "Opportunism": The Six-Year Development Results of 5G and ORAN Are
The World Telecommunication Day (World Telecommunication and Information Society Day) on May 17, 2025, which just passed, is the 160th anniversary of the establishment of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It also coincides with the sixth year of global 5G licensing and commercial use. A series of achievements are particularly eye-catching.
Especially in China, behind a long list of numbers such as more than 4 million 5G base stations, more than 1 billion 5G mobile phone users, and 90% of administrative villages with 5G, China has built a world-leading and largest information and communication network, actively responding to the ITU's mission of promoting technology inclusion and social equity, and fulfilling the digital implementation of life.
At the same time, China's 5G applications have been integrated into 86 of the 97 major categories of the national economy, and the industrial Internet has achieved full coverage of 41 major industrial categories, promoting the accelerated deployment of artificial intelligence and low-altitude economy, effectively promoting the deep integration of the real economy and the digital economy, and becoming the infrastructure foundation for promoting high-quality economic and social development.
Just as China's 5G innovation is practical, fulfilling the ITU mission, and leading the global information and communication industry to leapfrog development, another "technical direction" led by the United States has not had a decent success story in 6 years of development, but has left a "mess" and suffered a heavy blow from market reality!
The U.S. Department of Commerce released the latest test, and there is still a clear gap in the maturity of Open RAN.
In early May, the results of the two-year "Open RAN" test released by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States showed that although ORAN technology has passed the early stage, it will take time to reach the same maturity as traditional single-supplier solutions.
This test was announced during the Biden administration in 2022. It is a competition aimed at "accelerating the adoption of open interfaces, interoperable components and multi-supplier solutions to promote the development of an open 5G ecosystem." It is reported that Radisys, Capgemini, Mavenir, Fujitsu, NewEdge, and GXC have successively participated in the challenge.
The report pointed out that nearly 20 entities' products participated in the test, of which four suppliers successfully realized cross-vendor equipment networking, that is, the interconnection and intercommunication of O-CU, O-DU and O-RU of different manufacturers were completed through the Xn interface, and call switching of the N2/Xn interface was realized. For this reason, the report stated that the open RAN interface technology has made a substantial breakthrough.
However, the report did not disclose the list of companies that passed the test. This practice of "only giving results but not lists" has caused speculation in the industry about the integrity of the test. At the same time, the report also admitted that compared with the single-vendor solution, there is still a significant gap in the software maturity of Open RAN, especially in the upgrade of AI/ML algorithms required for network optimization.
The test confirmed that Open RAN has fatal flaws, and there has been no decent success story so far. The industry generally believes that the fatal flaw of Open RAN is not only the complexity of technology, but also the difficulty of industrial ecosystem coordination. The results of the NTIA test have largely confirmed this view. As a representative of a company participating in the test said, "When problems arise, vendors first blame each other instead of collaborating to solve them."
This reflects that Open RAN faces three insurmountable ecological barriers in its journey to maturity. On the one hand, enterprises are reluctant to share core code, which makes interface docking difficult; on the other hand, some subsystems are designed to be "customer-specific", which deviates from the nature of openness; in addition, there is a lack of funds to fix cross-vendor software compatibility issues. The $1.5 billion support fund approved by NTIA after much trouble is nothing but a drop in the bucket in the face of these obstacles.
The deeper reason behind this is the "original sin" of Open RAN itself. Tracing back to its origins, Open RAN was a "de-Sinicization" policy alliance formed by Trump in the name of openness during his first term. The goal was to curb the development momentum of Chinese companies when China was leading the 5G technology standards. The nature of "speculative" was greater than the essence of technological innovation. In the process of promotion, Trump played the routine of "America first", tilting the support funds and market resources towards local companies, trying to weaken the "allies" to support local equipment manufacturers.
As a result, Open RAN has not had any success stories so far, but has left a mess behind. For example, AT&T, the second largest operator in the United States, signed a $14 billion "exclusive Open RAN" contract with Ericsson, which directly "disappointed" the diversified supplier concept advocated by Open RAN; Mavenir, the benchmark of Open RAN in the United States, failed to commercialize in India and laid off 40% (about 2,000%) of its employees after being rejected by the three major local operators; the American commercial economy
Although Japan's Rakuten and the United States' Dish have deployed Open RAN, these two companies are "half-way" into the mobile communications field, which is a new network with limited business scale, making it difficult to form a convincing demonstration effect in the entire industry. At the same time, although several large European operators claim to be testing pilot sites, Open RAN has not yet been able to enter their networks.
"Innovation and pragmatism" vs. "speculationism", the difference between Chinese and American information and communications innovation has been determined
Comparing the two, it is not difficult to find that the different paths chosen by China and the United States when they switched gears to 5G upgrade six years ago doomed the different results today. China followed the objective law of the generational upgrade of mobile communication technology standards, steadily promoted 5G technology iteration and industrial collaboration, and created a mobile communication industry with competitive advantages; the United States isolated China in the name of promoting the openness of the 5G ecosystem and created its own "small circle", and is still climbing the hill for technological breakthroughs and ecological integration.
Looking to the future, China is accelerating the research and development of 5G-A and 6G technologies, industrial cultivation and application development, empowering the construction of a modern industrial system with more advanced ICT infrastructure, and actively participating in global digital governance to better integrate into international industrial development. The United States, however, continues to pursue "speculationism", building an Open RAN religious system and isolating China's leading technology companies, deviating from the rules of technological development.
Needless to say, globally unified standards are the foundation for ensuring the healthy and sustainable development of the mobile communications innovation chain and industrial chain. This high-tech highland cannot become a political show. Looking back at the development of mobile communications, from 1G to 5G, each generation of change is accompanied by a thrilling battle of communication standards. In the end, those forces that respect technological development and market laws have made great progress; while those players who set up their own stoves for their own selfish interests were finally left on the beach!
"The green mountains cannot block the flow of water; it will eventually flow eastwards!" While the software maturity of Open RAN is still stuck in the AI/ML algorithm upgrades required for network optimization, mainstream global operators, including the three major Chinese operators, have set a goal of achieving L4 advanced autonomous networks by 2025, embarking on a new and exciting journey along the right track.