Dell'Oro Group says Open RAN, Cloud RAN and multi-vendor RAN are set to follow diverging paths, breaking with the industry habit of treating the three terms as interchangeable.

The market research firm laid out the split in a new report. The core message for operators and vendors is simple. The architectures that carriers often bundle under a single "open" banner will not mature at the same pace, win the same accounts or carry the same revenue weight.

For practitioners, the distinction matters. Open RAN refers to radio networks built on interoperable, standards-based interfaces. Cloud RAN moves baseband processing onto cloud-native platforms. Multi-vendor RAN simply splits the supply chain across several suppliers, with or without open interfaces. Each model carries different integration risk, different vendor economics and different procurement logic.

What does the divergence mean for operators?

An operator can pursue multi-vendor sourcing without adopting cloudification. It can also virtualize the RAN while keeping a single dominant vendor. Dell'Oro's framing suggests these choices will increasingly pull apart rather than converge.

That reading has commercial consequences. Suppliers such as Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung and the emerging Open RAN specialists compete differently in each lane. A divergence means procurement teams must pick a lane, or fund several.

It also complicates vendor messaging. Marketing claims that blur the three categories will carry less weight as buyers separate them. Dell'Oro, as an independent analyst house, bases its assessments on tracked sales and operator deployments rather than vendor positioning.

Why the categories split now

The RAN market has spent several years digesting Open RAN commitments from major operators, including early deployments in Japan, the UK and the US. Results have been mixed. Some carriers scaled back open interface ambitions. Others pushed forward with cloudified baseband under different names.

Dell'Oro's conclusion follows that pattern. The analyst house tracks RAN equipment revenue and publication of forecasts on these segments. Its view that the paths diverge signals a market that has stopped assuming one architecture drags the others along.

For vendor strategy teams, the report is a planning input rather than a verdict. It indicates where investment, standards work and integration effort should concentrate. For operators, it frames the build-or-buy decision for each layer of the radio network separately.

The full forecast detail, including segment-level revenue projections, sits in the Dell'Oro report. Watch how the analyst house's next quarterly RAN update distributes growth across the three categories, because that distribution will show which path operators are actually funding.