8 Years After Its Founding at Mobile World Congress, Can Open RAN Scale?

BARCELONA, March 10, 2026 — For decades, mobile operators had little choice in how they built their networks. A handful of equipment vendors controlled the entire stack – radios, software, and the interfaces between them – leaving carriers dependent on whichever supplier they had chosen and unable to mix components from competitors.

That changed in February 2018, when five of the world's largest mobile operators founded the O-RAN Alliance at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that year. The founding members – U.S.-based AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, Japan-based NTT DOCOMO, and France-based Orange – advocated for open, interoperable mobile networks, in which hardware and software from different vendors can be mixed and matched instead of purchased as a single proprietary system. The approach, they argued, would drive down costs, accelerate innovation, and reduce dependence on any single supplier.

Eight years in

Eight years later, advocates of the movement said on March 3, at the 2026 O-RAN Alliance Summit, that one of its most ambitious bets has paid off. Rakuten Mobile, the Japanese carrier that built the world's largest fully open, cloud-native mobile network from scratch, reported its first annual profit last year. The network now serves 10.2 million subscribers across 350,000 cells built on disaggregated, multi-vendor infrastructure.