Airspan is positioning itself to pick up business that Mavenir and NEC are walking away from, as both companies pull back from the 5G radio access network market they once championed as challengers to the established equipment establishment.

The opening is unusual. The RAN sector has spent the past decade consolidating around three dominant suppliers — Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia — with Samsung growing steadily and ZTE holding its home market in China. When two of the more credible challengers exit at roughly the same time, the small pool of operators that deliberately sought alternatives loses options, and the survivors gain a shot at their accounts.

Airspan sits among those survivors. The US-based vendor has spent years selling small cells and, more recently, full macro RAN products built around open interfaces. It has historically pitched itself to operators that wanted to reduce their dependence on the big three, and to greenfield or neutral-host builders that the incumbents were slower to serve. The departures of Mavenir and NEC from parts of the 5G RAN business hand Airspan a chance to argue it is now the most credible independent option left standing.

The commercial reality is harsher than the pitch. Challenger RAN vendors have struggled for years to convert operator enthusiasm for openness and vendor diversity into sustained, profitable contracts. Development costs for new radio generations are enormous, sales cycles are long, and margins are thin when competing against incumbents with far greater scale. Mavenir and NEC's retreats are themselves evidence of that economics: interest in alternative suppliers did not translate into business that justified continued investment for either company.

For Airspan, the opportunity therefore comes with the same risks that caught its departing rivals. Winning displaced accounts means funding trials, integrations and support commitments for operators that may be shopping largely on price. The vendor's own financial history shows the difficulty of the segment, and absorbing new business profitably will demand disciplined deal selection rather than volume for its own sake.

The exits also carry implications for the open RAN movement, which both Mavenir and NEC promoted heavily. Open RAN's advocates argued that standardized interfaces and virtualized software would let new entrants compete for macro RAN business, weakening the incumbents' grip. A market in which several prominent open RAN champions have scaled back undermines that thesis, at least for the near term. Airspan, which has built its portfolio around open architectures, now carries more of the burden of proving the model can support a stand-alone vendor.

For operators, the immediate effect is practical. Carriers that had trialled or deployed Mavenir or NEC radio products face roadmap questions and potential replacement decisions. Those that have not yet committed to a second supplier will find their shortlist shorter. Some may conclude that the safest path runs back to the incumbents; others will look at Airspan precisely because it is still investing in the segment its rivals abandoned.

Much now depends on how quickly Airspan can convert the moment into contracts. Its stated intent is to pursue the customers and opportunities the exits leave behind, and the coming quarters of rollout and procurement decisions will show whether that intent translates into deployments — or whether the 5G RAN market closes further around the incumbents.