Summary Bullets:
• Echostar, owner of Boost Mobile, will sell its wireless spectrum to AT&T and decommission its Open virtual RAN – which Open RAN proponents had long pointed to as a proof-point of Open RAN’s value.
• The news not only impacts Boost Mobile’s RAN suppliers but could also become a symbol of Open RAN’s long struggle to accelerate adoption and a bellwether for the sector’s near-term prospects.
Echostar’s move this week to sell its wireless spectrum licenses to AT&T and transition into a “hybrid mobile network operator” is a grim milestone for the Open RAN ecosystem, since the company’s Boost Mobile operator unit says it will wind down parts of its open virtual RAN (vRAN) as a result.
AT&T will purchase Echostar’s licenses for 50 MHz of nationwide wireless spectrum in the 3.45 GHz and 600 MHz ranges (midband and low-band spectra) for approximately $23 billion. Boost Mobile’s subscribers will continue to receive service via the company’s 5G core platform, but, Echostar said, “Primary connectivity will be provided by AT&T’s towers.”
“As a result of this transaction,” Echostar added in a statement, “elements of Boost Mobile’s RAN will be decommissioned over time.”
The development is a serious blow to the long-struggling Open RAN movement, as Echostar’s mobile network has been one of the few examples of a nationwide open vRAN that stakeholders pointed to as a real-world proof point for the model of pairing cloud-native vRAN with a mix of third-party radios.
The decommissioning of Boost’s RAN is bad news for Samsung and Fujitsu (now 1Finity), which had both supplied radios for it, and for vRAN specialist WindRiver, which had supplied cloud containerization software. It may be worse news for Mavenir, which had not only supplied Boost’s RAN software but also – as a devoted Open RAN evangelist – repeatedly used the greenfield network as a showcase of open vRAN’s merits. Alternative showcases are few, especially since many Open RANs are built on basebands and radios from the same vendor – not the kind of multi-vendor RANs that would well illustrate the Open RAN concept. Vodafone was widely expected to launch a large-scale Open RAN deployment that might serve as a much-needed brownfield showcase, but the European operator has been quiet on the topic this year, prompting speculation that it might have scaled back its plans. And AT&T has never provided much detail on exactly how many multi-vendor Open RANs it’s deploying.
Echostar’s gut punch for Open RAN fans comes only about two months after Mavenir announced that the ongoing struggle to accelerate the Open RAN market had led it to halt development of its in-house radio portfolio. And this was despite the vendor’s having been selected as one of two radio suppliers to the AT&T network overseen by Ericsson.
It’s not clear how the fate of Boost’s network might affect the Open RAN Center for Integration & Deployment created by Echostar in early 2024 using a $50-million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Some Open RAN proponents in the US continue to promote the technology as important to help their country counter China and its primary RAN vendors, which don’t support Open RAN.
Meanwhile, the vRAN sector – which is intertwined with Open RAN but in recent years has enjoyed stronger momentum, is facing fresh headwinds as well. Intel – the dominant supplier of vRAN silicon – has been mired in significant uncertainty of late, with financial woesthat preceded new investment from Japan’s SoftBank and – in a rare move – the US government. Though vRAN and Open RAN can exist independently, a blow to one can bruise the other.
Open RAN will likely continue to make modest incremental gains in the market, though the current mobile operator spending trough between 5G and 6G eras doesn’t offer much hope of a boost in the near term. In fact, even using the word “boost” in Open RAN circles might not be advisable.