MWC 2024: the Open RAN market has entered a new phase, led by a clique of large vendors and operators

The next generation of RAN technologies is always the central theme of Mobile World Congress (MWC), and the 2024 event in Barcelona was full of demonstrations (from the practical to the outlandish) of what the latest 5G technologies could deliver in terms of user experience. The show was AI-centric, so the integration of AI into the RAN was inevitably an important topic; Open RAN remained a prominent topic too, as it was in 2023. However, the debate about Open RAN’s benefits has been reframed in the past year, and MWC demonstrated how a trend that was supposed to “democratise the RAN” is now firmly in the hands of small group of very large vendors and operators.