Mavenir retains its Open RAN vendor crown

• TelecomTV has just conducted its second annual Open RAN market perception survey
• We asked the network operator community for their views on a range of Open RAN topics, including which vendors they believe to be the market leaders
• For the second year running, Mavenir topped the chart, and was a long way ahead of other tech suppliers and developers 

Mavenir has once again been recognised by the network operator community as the Open RAN technology market leader, according to the results of TelecomTV’s latest Open RAN market perception survey.

As we did last year, TelecomTV published a survey – exclusively for those who work at network operators – asking them for their views about the Open RAN sector. We received responses during January and February from 70 individuals representing more than 35 network operators from North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia Pacific, representing more than 1.4 billion customers across their group operations. The job titles of the respondents ranged from CTO to RAN engineer, with the vast majority in network technology planning, management or deployment roles. 

One of the questions we asked was: Which of the following technology suppliers/vendors do you regard as Open RAN sector leaders? Our respondents could select as many options as they thought relevant and add any names we had missed from our list of suggestions.

As you can see from the chart above, Mavenir, which recently reported a significant rise in the value of its bookings over the past year, is far and away the leader in these perception survey results. It attracted votes from 77% of our respondents, higher than last year’s 71%, even though the vendor has had something of a tough year as Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung Networks muscled their way into the biggest Open RAN deals of the past 12 months or so. 

Mavenir, which in the run up to the giant MWC25 show in Barcelona has announced a 5G non-standalone (NSA) Open RAN collaboration with Parallel Wireless, is the only vendor with a score greater than 50% this year. 

The chart above shows only the top-eight vendors – you can find the full chart (featuring more than 20 vendors) and all the details of the survey results in our new, 15-page, free-to-download, Open RAN Market Perception Report 2025, which is the latest in a series of free reports on a broad range of telecom sector topics. 

And as you can see, in eighth place is Ericsson, which has been ploughing significant marketing resources into its Open RAN pitch ever since it landed the groundbreaking five-year, $14bn deal with AT&T in late 2023. In our Open RAN market perception survey last year, the Swedish vendor was in 13th place in the ranking, when it attracted votes from just 17% of our respondents, so it is certainly gaining recognition amongst the telecom operator community as an Open RAN leader.

We also asked our telco executive respondents questions about Open RAN deployment timelines, which network operators are regarded as Open RAN pioneers, the potential of Open RAN to broaden the scope of the vendor ecosystem, and more. You can download the report for free now!

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV