Deutsche Telekom is planning an open RAN deployment across about 30,000 mobile sites, according to a Light Reading report, after field work with Nokia produced results the German operator considers convincing enough to take the technology to national scale.

The plan represents one of the largest open RAN commitments announced by a European operator to date. It also marks a competitive win for Nokia, whose equipment will replace gear supplied by Huawei in the Deutsche Telekom network — a swap with political as much as technical significance in Germany's ongoing debate about high-risk vendors.

Deutsche Telekom has been testing open RAN with multiple vendors for several years, running trials across sites in Germany as it assessed whether interfaces standardized by the O-RAN Alliance could match the performance of conventional, tightly integrated radio networks. The reported success of the Nokia deployment appears to have answered that question for the operator's leadership, clearing the way for a much broader buildout.

The timing matters for German policy. Berlin's implementation of the EU's 5G Security Toolbox has pressured operators to reduce their reliance on Chinese vendors, and Deutsche Telekom has faced scrutiny over the Huawei equipment still carrying traffic on its network. A 30,000-site open RAN program built around Nokia would address both the security discussion and the operator's multivendor ambitions in a single move.

For Nokia, the deal is a vote of confidence at a moment when the Finnish vendor needs flagship references for open RAN in its home region. Operators have been slow to commit to open interfaces at scale, citing concerns about integration costs and performance, and a national deployment by Europe's largest operator would give Nokia evidence that its open RAN portfolio can carry production traffic at volume.

The shift also signals that open RAN is moving past the proof-of-concept stage in mature European markets. Early deployments were largely confined to greenfield operators, rural coverage obligations and markets in Japan, where Rakuten and NTT Docomo led the way. A Deutsche Telekom rollout measured in tens of thousands of sites would put the technology into the heart of a dense, capacity-heavy European network.

The report does not specify a completion date for the 30,000-site program, and Deutsche Telekom has not yet published a full rollout schedule. The pace of the swap will depend on how quickly the operator can integrate open RAN software and radios into live sites without disrupting service, and on procurement decisions still to be finalized across its vendor base.