State of O-RAN

Why It Matters

Greater specification maturity, open-source consolidation and operator-driven deployment lower barriers to multi-vendor networks and accelerate cloud-native, programmable RANs—reshaping competitive dynamics for operators and suppliers and enabling faster rollouts of advanced services.

Summary

At the O-RAN Alliance Summit chair Thomas Lips said the project is moving from proof-of-concept to a productivity phase focused on real-world value, with operator-led, stepwise cloudification, disaggregation and automation driving scaled adoption. The Alliance produced more detailed specifications in 2025, strengthened test profiles for massive MIMO, advanced the SMO/service-based architecture and APIs, and decided to migrate its O-RAN Software Community into the Linux Foundation. Security is being treated as a core requirement, and while many integrations are complete, implementation feedback is still driving iterative enhancements as the industry prepares for 6G.

Original Description

The O-RAN ALLIANCE chair’s address highlighted the latest updates on the organisation’s progress and the alignment of global efforts towards its mission to transform the RAN to be open, intelligent, virtualised and fully interoperable.

Featuring: Thomas Lips, Chair of the Board of O-RAN ALLIANCE and SVP RAN Disaggregation & Enablement, Deutsche Telekom

First broadcast: March 2026

#TelecomTV #ORANALLIANCE #RAN #mwc26 #SpotlightOn5G #AI