Open RAN Crosses the Tipping Point as AT&T, Rakuten and Deutsche Telekom Scale Deployments in 2026
The three largest Open RAN operators are scaling deployments in 2026, with AT&T past 50% of its Nokia-to-Ericsson radio swap and targeting 70% open-capable traffic by year-end.
Overview
After years of pilot projects and cautious testing, Open Radio Access Network technology is reaching commercial scale across three continents in 2026. The three operators that have bet most aggressively on the architecture — AT&T in the United States, Rakuten Mobile in Japan, and Deutsche Telekom in Europe — are each hitting deployment milestones that collectively signal Open RAN’s transition from aspirational standard to operational reality.
What We Know
AT&T’s $14 Billion Network Overhaul
AT&T’s Open RAN transformation, anchored by a five-year collaboration with Ericsson valued at approximately $14 billion, has crossed the halfway mark. The carrier has completed more than 50 percent of its radio replacement program, swapping out Nokia equipment for Ericsson hardware on open-capable platforms, and now carries more than half of its wireless network traffic on open-capable infrastructure.
The goal is to push that figure to 70 percent by the end of 2026, a target that AT&T’s leadership reaffirmed at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. AT&T’s decision to drop Nokia as a primary RAN vendor in favor of Ericsson in December 2023 was one of the telecom industry’s most consequential procurement decisions in years, sending Nokia shares to a three-year low at the time.
Beyond the radio swap, AT&T has achieved several technical firsts. In 2025, the carrier completed the first Open RAN call on a commercial network using third-party radios from Ericsson and Fujitsu’s 1Finity subsidiary. More recently, AT&T and Ericsson have demonstrated AI-native link adaptation running on Intel Xeon 6-powered Cloud RAN infrastructure, achieving up to a 20 percent throughput improvement over legacy rule-based systems. AT&T is now live with Cloud RAN in two cities and is scaling deployments.
AT&T has also become the first communications service provider globally to deploy a third-party rApp — a modular software application that runs on the RAN Intelligent Controller — to optimize its live production network, marking a step toward the software-defined network that Open RAN promises.
Rakuten Mobile Proves the Economics
In Japan, Rakuten Mobile has provided the most compelling evidence that an Open RAN-native network can be commercially viable. The operator reached 10 million subscribers in December 2025, just five years and eight months after its commercial launch, and reported its first full-year EBITDA profit in fiscal year 2025, with mobile segment EBITDA reaching 28.8 billion yen.
Rakuten operates approximately 350,000 cells sourced from seven different radio vendors, making it the largest fully virtualized Open RAN deployment in the world. The company claims its capital expenditure costs are 40 percent lower and operating expenses 30 percent lower than what a traditional proprietary RAN architecture would require.
The operator is now expanding its 5G footprint with around 3,000 massive MIMO radios from 1Finity powered by Qualcomm’s Dragonwing QRU100 Platform, while Rakuten Symphony — its Open RAN technology arm — reported operating profit for the first time since its founding.
Deutsche Telekom Scales Across Europe
Deutsche Telekom, Europe’s largest telecommunications operator, has deployed Open RAN across more than 3,000 sites in Germany, replacing Huawei equipment with Nokia and Fujitsu hardware under O-RAN Alliance-compliant specifications. The company launched a request for quotation covering 30,000 additional sites at the beginning of 2026, primarily across its European operations outside Germany — a tender that, if completed, would represent the continent’s largest Open RAN deployment.
At MWC 2026, Deutsche Telekom executive Thomas Lips noted that “adoption is really happening at scale,” describing how each major operator is customizing its implementation strategy rather than following a one-size-fits-all approach.
What We Don’t Know
While deployment numbers are accelerating, several open questions remain. The RAN Intelligent Controller remains largely proprietary, controlled by a small number of vendors including Nokia, and industry analysts have identified this as a potential bottleneck for the open ecosystem’s development. Whether the software layer above the hardware can truly become vendor-agnostic remains an unresolved challenge.
The economics of Open RAN outside the largest Tier-1 operators are also uncertain. AT&T’s $14 billion commitment and Rakuten’s years of operating losses before reaching profitability suggest that the upfront investment required is substantial. Smaller and mid-sized operators may struggle to justify similar expenditures, particularly in markets with heavy regulation and limited geographic reach.
Deutsche Telekom’s 30,000-site tender also carries execution risk. The company’s original Open RAN timelines shifted after Germany decided not to mandate a full Huawei rip-and-replace, introducing ambiguity about the pace of transition in markets where regulatory pressure is less acute.
Analysis
The convergence of AT&T, Rakuten, and Deutsche Telekom all scaling their Open RAN deployments simultaneously in 2026 represents a meaningful inflection point for the technology. For years, Open RAN skeptics pointed to a lack of Tier-1 operator commitments and questioned whether disaggregated networks could match the performance and reliability of integrated systems from Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei. Those objections are becoming harder to sustain as AT&T carries majority traffic on open-capable hardware and Rakuten demonstrates profitability on a fully virtualized network.
The next frontier is AI integration. All three operators are deploying AI-driven optimization within their Open RAN architectures — from AT&T’s AI-native link adaptation to Rakuten’s intelligent RAN controller — positioning the open platform as the foundation for the AI-native networks that the industry expects 6G to require. Whether Open RAN can deliver on that longer-term promise will depend on resolving the proprietary control points that still exist within the nominally open ecosystem.