Key Points
Vodafone Idea (Vi) recently joined the ranks of major telecom players like Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel by securing significant contracts with traditional network vendors such as Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung..
Open RAN is a vendor-agnostic technology, designed to allow the sharing of hardware, software and radio components, potentially leading to substantial cost reductions..
Rahul Atri, managing director at Rakuten Symphony India, said that he expects large open RAN deployments beginning in 2026 worldwide.. 5G deployments were faster in India than other geographies and therefore, going with traditional tech stack was a natural choice for Indian telcos for Macro networks..
But we believe that in the near term, orchestration will be the key enabler of driving efficiencies and automation across traditional, cloud native and O-RAN networks, Atri said.. Europes largest telecom company Vodafone has committed to deploy O-RAN in 30% of its European sites by 2030..
Despite this, he expressed optimism about the future of O-RAN in a fast-scaling, cost-sensitive market like India, where Open-RAN can revolutionise network architecture by decoupling hardware from software.
