The O-RAN hardware and software market is forecast to account for 10% of the broader RAN market and surpass $5 billion in cumulative revenue through 2025, according to a report from Dell’Oro Group. Sales of virtualized O-RAN basebands and radios, including software and firmware, are expected to capture less than 1% of the RAN market this year, but the double-digital annual growth rates predicted by Dell’Oro Group are being fueled by various factors, including a politically-motivated trade war that generally positions open RAN as an alternative to Chinese-made equipment.

“It will be interesting to see the split between fiber and fixed wireless technologies used to support these unserved areas, as Charter has been committed to both technologies,” said Dell’Oro Group’s Jeff Heynen, vice president for broadband access and home networking, in a Monday morning email to FierceTelecom. “In general, we are expecting to see an uptick this year in cable remote OLT deployments for FTTH this year and next, as part of both greenfield and overbuild scenarios. We assume some of these deployments will be for RDOF-related projects, such as Charter’s.”

Delays that have long beset IoT, and machine-to-machine (M2M) frameworks that preceded it, are still apparent but not as significant as they were a few years ago, explained Stefan Pongratz, VP at Dell’Oro Group. “While some might have expected this to be larger by now, the reality is that IoT revenues are still growing at a faster pace than non-IoT revenues and remain on track to account for 5% of operators’ wireless revenues by 2025, up from 1% to 2% in 2019,” he wrote in response to questions.

The radio access network (RAN) market is, thanks in large part to operators’ 5G investments, growing faster than it has in about a decade, according to Dell’Oro Group. Global RAN revenues neared $35 billion in 2020 and were closer to $31 billion in 2010, Stefan Pongratz, VP at the market research firm, told SDxCentral.