- AT&T CTO Jeremy Legg reinforced the company’s commitment to Open RAN
- The ability to have multiple radio and antenna providers remains a high priority
- The technology eventually will be adopted throughout the industry, according to Legg
If there’s any doubt about which way the Open RAN movement is going, here’s a prediction from the CTO of AT&T: It’s going to take over the industry.
“O-RAN will take the industry, that's not going to be just us,” said AT&T CTO Jeremy Legg during a KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum fireside chat this morning.
That may sound like a no-brainer coming from AT&T, one of the biggest cheerleaders of the technology. But it’s significant given the blowback AT&T received after it awarded Ericsson a $14 billion, multi-year Open RAN contract in 2023.
While that award signaled AT&T’s commitment to Open RAN, it also set off alarm bells. That’s because the technology was created to encourage more vendors to compete in the RAN space. AT&T’s selection of Ericsson put the RAN right back into the clutches of the same kinds of big infrastructure vendors the movement was trying to get away from.
Ever since that single-vendor award was announced, AT&T has insisted it’s pursuing a multi-vendor RAN strategy. Legg reinforced that today.
“We want to have the ability to have multiple radio and antenna providers for a single RAN,” he said. “We want there to be the ability to have virtualized RAN or centralized RAN and have different sets of software that are running on those baseband boxes. That makes a lot of sense.”
Legg said they’re well down the path of putting Ericsson gear into its O-RAN network – AT&T is getting rid of Nokia gear to do so – as well as opening up the network. Just last week, AT&T, Ericsson and 2Finity, a Fujitsu company, said they marked a major milestone by completing the first Open RAN call using third-party radios at AT&T Labs.
Why AT&T chose Open RAN
Legg was asked why AT&T made the decision to go down the O-RAN path in the first place. Legg said there were a number of reasons, including the economics of it.
Another was the desire for networks to be open and the idea that “ultimately, closed network ecosystems generally break down, and you were starting to see that with a lot of the infrastructure providers for these closed networks. There was a lot of consolidation going on in that industry,” he said.
Lastly, it got to the point where the culture and philosophy of people whose business models were really focused on closed ecosystems finally saw that open ecosystems ultimately were going to happen. He didn’t mention Ericsson by name, but many industry insiders will recall that Ericsson and Nokia – but especially Ericsson – initially resisted the Open RAN movement with all their might.
Eventually, Ericsson came around. “Once we got all that stuff aligned, we really became comfortable in moving down this path, and we continue to believe it's the right path,” he said.
Wireless networks traditionally have been very closed, and “you can’t just plug into a wireless network,” he said. “O-RAN changes that equation and allows people, through SDKs, RDKs and other software tools, to be able to plug into the network and leverage those services,” he said.
The long pole in the tent will be the API layers that sit on top of the infrastructure – “and how much adoption you really begin to see across the industry in leveraging those APIs,” he added.
“But the fundamentals of O-RAN – it makes a lot of sense to do it,” he said.
Fierce Network is hosting the virtual Open RAN Summit on September 16-17, 2025, where AT&T VP or RAN Technology Rob Soni will give a keynote. Register here!