AT&T’s four Open RAN pillars—open basebands, third-party radio integration, cloud RAN, and advanced network management
In a landmark deal that signaled the maturity of Open RAN for major brownfield communications service providers (CSPs), AT&T in 2023 announced it would spend more than $14 billion over the next five years to modernize its radio access network (RAN) using disaggregated hardware from multiple vendors. AT&T’s stated goal is to transition 70% of its wireless network traffic to open, programmable platforms by late 2026.
In an interview filmed during Mobile World Congress 2025, AT&T and Fujitsu executives outlined the strategic importance of the relationship and its implications for broader cultivation of the Open RAN ecosystem.
AT&T’s Rob Soni, vice president of radio access technology, described the four “pillars’ supporting its “transformation to open”: moving from a proprietary to open baseband, bringing in third-party radios to support “innovative and creative” deployment and densification scenarios, transition to cloud-based RAN, and advanced network management.
Expanding on using an open baseband to interoperate with third-party radios, Soni said the move “enables the opportunity for companies like Fujitsu to pair with Ericsson in the network directly…We’ve aligned on picking Fujitsu particularly as a preferred supplier for what we’d call our first of many third-party radios.” He explained that allowing radio vendors to directly innovate with AT&T, rather than being gated by a proprietary baseband, creates new opportunities around observability, alarming, and other capabilities that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.
As Open RAN standards, interoperability testing, and integration in greenfield and brownfield networks have progressed, deploying performant, stable multi-vendor systems is becoming less complicated. Fujitsu Network Communications Vice President and Head of Radio Unit Business and Development Patrik Eriksson said the process is continuously improving. “Now there’s maturity in the ecosystem with multi-vendor product management, automation of test suites—it’s basically letting us spend much less time, and also less effort, than in the past.” Fujitsu’s work with Ericsson for AT&T “is basically taking it to the next level,” he said, because they have to deliver on operational and performance requirements “that are least as good as single RAN.”
The key takeaway, Soni said, is that AT&T, and other CSPs, want solutions designed to solve their specific, unique problems, which large incumbents trying to address a global market were reluctant to address. “There was a strong customer focus from Fujitsu to drive towards something that was very specifically for AT&T to solve a problem…The interesting side effect is that now we’ve started to hear that as this radio has proliferated, the other operators are also looking for this radio. So we’re hoping that generates the kind of scale that’s ultimately valuable not just for us, but for Fujitsu.”
In summary, AT&T’s collaboration with Ericsson, Fujitsu, and other hardware and software vendors to deploy Open RAN technologies represents a pivotal shift toward open, flexible, and multi-vendor network infrastructures. This endeavor is poised to enhance network efficiency, stimulate innovation, and set new benchmarks for the telecommunications industry.
