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Verizon said it is working with both Samsung and Ericsson on O-RAN equipment.
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The carrier said it has already deployed 130,000 O-RAN compliant radios made by Samsung.
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This is even more bad news for Nokia
Verizon announced Monday that it has deployed 130,000 Samsung Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) radios into its network, and said it is also working with Ericsson on O-RAN.
“We are collaborating with both Samsung and Ericsson on O-RAN equipment,” a Verizon spokesperson said. “The items referenced in this release are from Samsung.”
After AT&T signed a $14 billion O-RAN deal with Ericsson in early December last year, EJL Wireless Research analyst Earl Lamb said Verizon was already working on O-RAN with Ericsson. . Lam then said at the time that Verizon was developing its own internal version of his O-RAN using a combination of Ericsson and Samsung equipment. The operator has now confirmed that this is the case.
Verizon’s O-RAN transition builds on the virtualized RAN (vRAN) work it already did with Samsung. According to Verizon, the transition to a cloud-native, container-based virtualization architecture began with a virtualized core in 2019 and moved to fully virtualized baseband capabilities in 2020.
Nokia’s fading aurora
Verizon had already selected Samsung to supply its 4G and 5G RAN equipment in 2018. The carrier’s move to O-RAN with Samsung and Ericsson further reinforced Nokia’s declining position in the US RAN market.
Meanwhile, New Street Research recently noted that Ericsson is AT&T’s primary RAN supplier and T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz mid-band 5G RAN supplier.
This puts Nokia at a near disadvantage to all major US carriers. The company has already announced 14,000 job cuts and sales fell 23% in the fourth quarter, but RAN expects a recovery in the second half of 2024.
In fact, the overall health of the global RAN market is not very good. Now that China has nearly completed its 5G rollout, even number one vendor Huawei could find itself in trouble.
