The press releases have been running for two years now. Open RAN in the DAS. Multi-vendor interoperability. The end of the equipment room.
Then I go to work.
Across the venues I support in New York and New Jersey, I haven't seen a single O-RAN signal source feeding a DAS. Not one. The head-ends I work in take the same input they took five years ago; RF, through a point of interface, from a carrier's base station one rack over.
That gap, between what the industry announces and what's actually in the rack, is worth talking about honestly.
What's supposed to be changing
The pitch is simple enough, and the engineering behind it is sound.
In the old model, a building that wanted decent cellular coverage hosted a small piece of the carrier's network. Baseband units. A signal source. Rack space, power, cooling, and space you couldn't use for anything else. Change vendors and you're replacing hardware.
Open RAN splits that apart. The processing that used to sit in your equipment room moves to a regional data center. What stays in the building is the radio layer and the distribution. The carrier delivers coverage over fiber instead of delivering a rack.
For a building owner, that's the whole story: less equipment, less power, less space, faster to turn up. Cellular starts to look like every other service the building buys.
The upgrade path is smaller than people think
Here's the best part.
You don't need a new DAS to get there. The vendors have built the bridge into the head-end itself.
JMA documents two points of interface side by side. One takes traditional RF from a base station. The other — they call it the vPOI — is an all-digital interface to an O-RAN signal source, band independent, with no RF components or cables required in the head-end. And the two are designed to coexist: RF inputs and O-RAN inputs, same system, same time.
CommScope announced third-party O-DU support on its ERA DAS and ONECELL small cell in February 2024. SOLiD has an O-RAN radio unit, has validated interoperability against Mavenir's distributed unit, and picked up a $27.68 million federal grant to push multi-operator open radios into DAS.
So the remotes stay. The fiber stays. The antennas stay. What changes is what feeds the system.
That's not a forklift. That's a card and a fiber run.
Worth noticing: "POI" is quietly doing two different jobs now. In an RF head-end it's a pad — it knocks a hot base station feed down to something the system can accept. In the O-RAN version it's a bridge, and it replaces the base station connection entirely.
So why isn't it in the buildings?
Two reasons, one of them is technical.
The first is that in-building follows the macro network, and the macro network is where the money is going. AT&T says more than half its traffic now runs on open-capable hardware, and it's on track for 70% by the end of this year. It's also happening on towers.
The second reason is harder. The multi-vendor promise — the thing Open RAN was actually sold on — is not landing. Dell'Oro now expects multi-vendor RAN to account for less than 5% of total deployments by 2030, cut from an earlier estimate of 5 to 10%. Market concentration in the RAN is higher today than it was before the O-RAN Alliance existed.
So it seems, the architecture built to end vendor lock-in has, so far, concentrated the market further.
That doesn't make the technology fake. AT&T, Ericsson, and Fujitsu's 1Finity completed the first open RAN call using third-party radios on a live commercial network in 2025. Verizon put multi-vendor O-RAN DAS into two Texas venues in November 2024, pairing a Samsung distributed unit with a CommScope system. Those happened.
But two venues and one call, announced one to two years ago, is not a wave. It's a proof of concept that hasn't been repeated at scale.
What I'd actually watch
Not the announcements... The purchase orders.
The head-ends being specified right now still take RF from a base station. Not because the O-RAN option doesn't exist — it does, and you can order it — but because nobody has a reason to change what already works, and because the carrier on the other end has to be ready to hand you a digital feed instead of an RF one.
When a venue does a refresh and the new head-end goes in with a digital interface on the front, that's the signal. Not a press release. A change order.
I haven't written one yet. When I do, I'll say so.
Have you seen an O-RAN signal source feeding a live DAS? I'd genuinely like to know where.