Perspectives

Abstract

by Stéphane Téral

Just back from Chicago, known as the windy city, to moderate an open RAN panel where about 4,000 attendees gathered at the iconic McCormick Place from May 12 to 14. Powered by the Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA), Connect (X) is the U.S. must-attend annual tradeshow and conference that brings together leaders from across the entire wireless infrastructure ecosystem including all major communications service providers (CSPs), tower companies (towercos), as well as every type of player involved in the process of building new sites. It’s worth citing other participants such as fiber companies (fibercos), cable, satellite, datacenter, governments and enterprise representatives.

While acknowledging the current economic pressures, business uncertainties, tariffs, trade wars, increasing costs and pressures on thin margins, Patrick Halley, president and CEO of WIA, delivered an optimistic yet realistic overview of the market conditions during his Day 1 opening remarks. The positive outlook was fully backed up on Day 2 during the prestigious panel featuring top executives from ATC, Crown Castle, Vertical Bridge, SBA Communications and Diamond Communicated, which Patrick moderated on Day 2 (Figure below). The same positive sentiment was felt across all major breakout sessions, including mine held on Wednesday 14 first thing in the morning with Mike Irizarry, EVP & CTO, US Cellular, Diane Rinaldo, Executive Director of the Open RAN Coalition, and Art King, Director of Product Management at Cohere Technologies. Our collective message was that open RAN has reached maturity and is moving forward both domestically and internationally.

My key takeaways can be summed up as follows:

• The U.S. wireless infrastructure activity is up YoY.
• The towercos are on the moon.
• Speaking of moon, the rise of Starlink brings news challenges.
• Satellite will never replace cellular, which will never displace DAS and WiFi.
• Open vRAN is here to stay and is spreading across brownfield and neutral host networks.

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