Open RAN: engineering for energy efficiency

Open RAN is a network strategy with growing appeal, but still only adopted by a small proportion of operators and mostly on a small scale. Despite this, there is a surprisingly strong vote of confidence in open RAN’s power efficiency. Little has been reported in the way of actual results, so is this confidence justified?

This Spotlight is part of a research series in partnership with Dell and Intel on the use of edge compute and RAN as part of sustainability strategy. Following the publication of "The next generation of operator sustainability", we will be exploring individual topics over the remainder of 2023 to detail how different deployment strategies are playing out – and how these may change in the coming years.