An Omdia analyst told RCR Wireless News that Japan remains the regional leader — and the global reference point — for open vRAN deployments
In sum – what to know:
Japan leads global open vRAN adoption – Rakuten Mobile operates the world’s largest open vRAN network, while NTT Docomo and KDDI have deployed early commercial versions.
Regional adoption remains limited – India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Vietnam are conducting trials, with few large-scale commercial rollouts so far.
Integration and performance issues persist – Omdia’s survey highlights maturity and interoperability as the main barriers to open RAN expansion across APAC.
Artificial intelligence-driven and cloud-native architectures are accelerating RAN transformation across Asia-Pacific, yet full-scale Open RAN (O-RAN) adoption remains limited outside Japan, Rémy Pascal, practice leader of mobile infrastructure at Omdia, said in an interview with RCR Wireless News.
Pascal noted that Japan remains the regional leader — and the global reference point — for open vRAN deployments. “There is Japan and there is the rest of APAC,” he said. “With Rakuten Mobile, Japan has the largest open vRAN network in the world. And NTT Docomo and KDDI have also been early adopters of open RAN and vRAN in their commercial networks.”
Beyond Japan, Pascal said progress has been slower, with “activities in other countries including India, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam and others, but at smaller scale, mostly pilot deployments and trial activities.”
He clarified that Omdia uses the term open vRAN rather than O-RAN because it combines two critical shifts: functional disaggregation and virtualization. “Open vRAN as we define it combines the principles of Open RAN — RAN functional disaggregation, open fronthaul interface — and the principles of vRAN — virtualization of the baseband functions, use of so-called general-purpose servers instead of dedicated appliances,” Pascal said. “Open vRAN is more transformative than open RAN alone, and it is always multi-vendor.”
Regarding the vendor ecosystem, Pascal highlighted the growing presence of Asian suppliers. “Korean and Japanese vendors have clearly taken advantage of open vRAN,” he said. “Their market shares in the open vRAN market segment are significantly higher than their market shares in the overall RAN market.” He also pointed to Taiwan’s “rich ecosystem of vendors, particularly for hardware — radio units, servers,” and noted increasing activity from vendors in China, India, and Vietnam.
In terms of operator motivations, Pascal said O-RAN adoption varies by use case. “Some operators have indeed identified specific use cases or scenarios where they plan to adopt O- RAN first, typically rural, indoor and/or private network deployments,” he said. Others, however, “believe that O-RAN should only be adopted if and when it’s good enough to serve all use cases and scenarios.”
Pascal cautioned that technical and commercial barriers remain the key challenge to scale. “According to Omdia’s annual survey of CSPs, the primary barriers to O-RAN adoption are its maturity, integration challenges — both in terms of multi-vendor integration and legacy-new architecture integration — and performance,” he said. “These challenges are consistently highlighted in both global and APAC-specific survey results.”
