The Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration have pushed for open, interoperable radio access networks as a national security and economic policy goal since 2020. The core argument: standardized interfaces between network components break up the equipment concentration dominated by Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, and Nokia, giving U.S. carriers an alternative to Chinese-made gear. Whether that argument has translated into commercial deployment is a more complicated question.
What “Open Networks” Means in Policy Terms
Open RAN: Open Radio Access Network, disaggregates the hardware and software layers of a cellular base station using standardized interfaces defined by the O-RAN Alliance. A traditional proprietary RAN requires a single vendor to supply the radio unit, the distributed unit, the centralized unit, and the software stack. Open RAN allows operators to mix components from different vendors, in theory driving down costs and reducing single-source dependency.
The FCC formally defined its interest in the technology in a March 2021 notice titled Promoting the Deployment of 5G Open Radio Access Networks, inviting public comment on the technical and policy barriers to adoption. The Commission stopped short of mandating Open RAN, a step carriers and incumbent vendors opposed, but signaled strong institutional preference for the architecture. The FCC placed Open RAN within its broader trusted communications mandate, directly linking the technology to the effort to eliminate Huawei and ZTE from U.S. networks. That mandate is governed by the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, signed March 12, 2020 (Pub.L. 116-124).
The Act established the rip-and-replace program: carriers receiving Universal Service Fund support must remove Huawei and ZTE equipment and are eligible for federal reimbursement. Congress appropriated $1.9 billion for the fund. As of 2024, funding shortfalls had left many smaller rural carriers unable to complete removal without additional appropriations: creating direct policy pressure for Open RAN alternatives. If Chinese equipment is removed, something must replace it, and the incumbents cannot supply every carrier simultaneously at competitive prices.
For background on FCC spectrum authority and the Commission’s broader regulatory toolkit, see the FCC Spectrum Auction Policy Guide.
The FCC and NTIA Toolkit: Rip-and-Replace and Innovation Funding
NTIA’s primary instrument for Open RAN promotion is the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, authorized under Section 9202 of the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act and funded by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 at $1.5 billion. The program operates through competitive grant rounds targeting ecosystem development rather than direct carrier subsidies.
Round 1, completed in August 2023, distributed $140.4 million across 17 recipients. Grantees included Mavenir, Rakuten Symphony, and academic research consortia focused on O-RAN Alliance interoperability testing. By early 2025, NTIA had awarded more than $413 million to 24 grantees across the first two rounds.
Round 3, announced in 2024 with a $450 million funding opportunity, focused on Industry Vertical Solutions, applying Open RAN in manufacturing, transportation, and utilities, and Integration Automation Solutions, targeting the software tooling required to manage multi-vendor network environments. Applications closed April 16, 2025, after NTIA extended the original deadline. The round remains under evaluation as of publication.
NTIA also launched the ACCoRD project, Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments: in coordination with AT&T, Verizon, Ericsson, and other industry participants. ACCoRD targets the interoperability testing gap: the absence of standardized conformance testing means operators cannot certify multi-vendor configurations with the same confidence as single-vendor deployments. That gap is the primary technical obstacle the program aims to close.
International Push: Allied Nations and the Prague Framework
The policy push for open networks is not exclusively American. The Prague 5G Security Conference in May 2019 produced the Prague Proposals, a set of security criteria for 5G vendors that became the foundation for allied nations’ trusted vendor frameworks. The Proposals did not specify Open RAN by name, but their requirement for vendor transparency and auditability created structural demand for architectures where no single opaque vendor controls the full stack.
The D10, a grouping of democratic tech-leading nations including the U.S., UK, EU members, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Australia, made Open RAN supply chain diversification a shared agenda item beginning in 2021. Japan’s NTT committed publicly to Open RAN development and deployment, partially as industrial policy to rebuild domestic network equipment capacity. The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport ran Open RAN lab trials with BT and Vodafone, producing interoperability test results shared with allied governments.
The EU’s 5G security toolbox pushed member states toward trusted vendor diversification without mandating Open RAN specifically. Germany and France have been more cautious, citing the maturity gap between Open RAN and conventional RAN performance metrics. As of 2024–2025, Open RAN deployments in Europe remain limited to pilots and partial rollouts, with commercial-scale deployment concentrated in Japan and the United States.
The security dimensions of Open RAN interoperability: including whether disaggregated architectures introduce new attack surfaces, are examined in the companion article on ORAN security and network policy.
Carrier Economics: Who Benefits and Who Resists
The commercial trajectory of Open RAN in the U.S. has been shaped by a single data point that advocates prefer not to foreground: EchoStar’s greenfield Open RAN network, launched in Las Vegas in 2022 as the most ambitious pure-ORAN deployment by a major U.S. carrier, was shut down. The company’s wireless business collapsed under debt load and subscriber shortfalls, and its Open RAN vendors, including Samsung and Mavenir, were left without their primary U.S. commercial reference deployment.
AT&T presents the sector’s more optimistic case. The carrier awarded Ericsson a $14 billion contract to supply its Open RAN network and has outlined a plan for 70 percent of its wireless network traffic to flow across open-capable platforms by late 2026. AT&T completed its first cloud RAN call with Ericsson in 2024 and has introduced Fujitsu and Mavenir as additional radio suppliers, using a site-by-site “popcorn” rollout approach.
T-Mobile has taken a different position. The carrier has publicly stated that Open RAN cannot yet match conventional RAN performance and has confined its Open RAN work to a lab in Bellevue, Washington, focused on AI-enhanced RAN optimization rather than disaggregated multi-vendor deployment. Global Open RAN revenue declined approximately 30 percent year-over-year in 2024, reflecting the EchoStar collapse and a slower greenfield adoption curve than the policy community projected. The infrastructure economics connect directly to BEAD program last-mile buildout priorities, detailed in the BEAD Program Guide.
What’s Next
The FCC has not issued a mandatory Open RAN order and is unlikely to do so under the current Commission composition. The policy mechanism remains incentive-based: NTIA grant funding, rip-and-replace reimbursement that creates replacement demand, and industry coordination through ACCoRD and the O-RAN Alliance. Round 3 of the Innovation Fund, under evaluation as of spring 2025, will direct up to $450 million toward the software and integration tooling layer: the segment the industry has identified as the primary technical obstacle to scaled deployment.
AT&T’s 2026 deployment target will serve as the sector’s principal commercial proof point. If 70 percent of AT&T traffic runs across open-capable RAN by late 2026, the architecture’s viability at Tier 1 scale is effectively demonstrated. If the rollout slips or performance gaps widen, the policy consensus around Open RAN will face renewed pressure from carriers and vendors who have always preferred procurement flexibility over architectural mandates. NTT’s deployments in Japan and UK DCMS lab results will determine, in parallel, whether Open RAN becomes a genuine allied standard or a policy preference that democratic nations endorse rhetorically but procure around.