Five years after India’s telecom giants first embraced Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) as a game-changer for the industry, meaningful deployment remains elusive. Despite early enthusiasm from Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea (Vi), O-RAN is yet to gain traction due to challenges like interoperability issues, security concerns, and the lack of proven cost advantages over proprietary network systems.
Telcos were excited about the idea of bringing O-RAN to India and engaging with multiple vendors for cellular network equipment rather than confining themselves to entities like Nokia and Ericsson. Reliance Jio has been developing its own O-RAN 5G stack, Bharti Airtel had announced a partnership with Mavenir and Vodafone Idea (Vi) planned to work with Ericsson and Samsung. However, come 2025 none of these collaborations have truly taken off. businessline reached out to some of the telcos on this topic but did not receive a response. While Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has partnered with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) for O-RAN deployment in India, TCS is yet to win another contract.
According to Professor V Sridhar from the International Institute of Information Technology in Bengaluru, one of the reasons for this is because telcos reacted prematurely to the technology when it came out. He pointed out that telcos first warmed up to O-RAN to get more vendor alternatives but no one was ready to risk the opportunity cost.
“The problem with setting up an Open RAN is that somebody has to put it all together and somebody has to orchestrate it and that requires a lot of time and effort. Unless there is a noticeable material advantage of doing that, nobody will do it. And that is why it has been taking so long. It has not yet been proven that O-RAN is going to have material advantage over proprietary software,” said Sridhar.
Despite this, he said that O-RAN will become a competitive alternative for telcos compared to the proprietary architecture by the time 6G is standardised in 2030. On a global scale, he said that even US telcos like Verizon and AT&T Mobile have not used the technology widely as it is still in its experimental stage.
“O-RAN is not yet carrier grade, which is what we need. But this is the way to go because O-RAN is less hardware independent,” said Sridhar.
While Sridhar estimated O-RAN to become popular in 2030, Prem Singh, Assistant Professor, IIIT Bangalore, said widespread deployment may happen within the next 203 years itself. He said that recent research developments in O-RAN have made the technology suitable for advanced 5G network. According to Singh, the most important development towards this trend was the ₹150 crore government funding under the National Mission of Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical System (MMICTS) scheme to develop advanced wireless communication technology
“For this scheme, the government has set up a IIIT-B COMET Foundation, in collaboration with other IITs, where the focus is to develop O-RAN technology in India. This is the first government initiative in this area.” said Singh.
Singh also flagged challenges from the service providers as well, who despite their initial enthusiasm showed low confidence in the technology due to interoperability issues and security risks owing to the “open” nature of the technology. Singh added there is no evidence to support the latter concern.
Moreover, Kunal Bajaj, CEO and Co founder, CloudExtel, India’s leading Network-as-a-service provider, said that the current O-RAN system lacks the scale and maturity to support national-scale deployment in India.
“The limited large-scale deployment of Open RAN in India is a complex issue. Network equipment decisions in India are typically made on a “circle” basis. CTOs allocate an entire circle, comparable in size and population to many European countries, to a single vendor like Nokia, Ericsson, or Samsung. Switching an entire Indian circle to an Open RAN platform is a significant decision, akin to a European country’s CTO changing their entire network. Currently, the Open RAN ecosystem lacks the scale and maturity to readily support such large-scale deployments,” he said.
In an earlier interaction, Bajaj had said that its shared RAN deployment at nine stations in Mumbai had performed very well even on day of the Cricket World Cup Victory Parade in South Bombay. He added that the challenges in expansion were more due to the dynamics of the industry.
“Once we have a more dynamic competitive environment, then the benefits of doing active sharing will start becoming apparent again. I think that will be the right time in which we’ll be able to really expand to more stations,” said Bajaj.
Aside from market dynamics, Jitendra Garg, Principal General Manager at BSNL, also flagged spectrum allocations as one of the challenges the company had to address for O-RAN’s deployment.
Speaking on the license and deployment of spectrum, T V Ramachandran, President at Broadband India Forum, “Direct spectrum has been allowed by the Cabinet, but not implemented. And somebody must ask, why? That is limiting the business. If that had been there, O-RAN would have worked very well there to give cost-effective networks. You’ve got very good potential system integrators there.” He added that private 5G still has enormous potential in India considering its private industries in healthcare, automotive, agriculture, etc.