Perspectives

Abstract

by Stéphane Téral
May 8, 2025

Just back from lovely sunny Dublin, Ireland, where I kicked off the “Special Focus: Open RAN” session that took place on Wednesday, April 30 from 8:30 to 12:00, during the OCP EMEA Summit. According to the Open Compute Project (OCP) executives, 1,100 people crowded the Convention Centre Dublin, which is 52% up from 725 attendees last year in Lisbon, Portugal. Kudos to Team OCP for pulling this off by proposing an outstanding agenda with marquee keynote speakers, and a comprehensive exhibition composed of companies from everywhere in the world.

Like last year, I was invited to support the OCP open RAN ecosystem illustrated in Figure 1 and promote the Evenstar project aimed at developing and commercializing affordable open radio units (RUs) to the masses. And oh boy, things are moving fast!

• The OCP Evenstar OpenRU community has released a white paper that specifies how to make wireless networking platforms open, enabling a true open RAN RU platform. With the OCP's modular specification process, it is easy to modify this platform in multiple forms such as indoor, outdoor, small cell, massive MIMO, etc... while keeping commonality between design and components. This is a new contribution available on the OCP Contribution database. (See https://lnkd.in/dB-R2MwS).
• Using OCP’s modular specifications, German startup Massive Beams became the world’s first vendor to design a modular software-defined open RAN RU operating over Ethernet, in a single device, over the same fiber.

As the OCP Evenstar OpenRU community decided to target the private 5G network segment, I presented a specific market overview that included 5-year RU unit forecasts broken down by spectrum bands and by region. Then, speakers from the companies mentioned in Figure 1 shared their respective perspectives of the open RAN market, including some of the work they are conducting. The rest of this research note focuses on the key takeaways from the session.

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