AT&T's $14 billion RAN contract with Ericsson, signed in February 2024 and billed as an open RAN deal, is looking harder to defend after Ericsson said that 6G networks will return to single-vendor geographic fiefdoms.

The shift appears in a recent Ericsson update on 6G architecture. "Ericsson is embracing all RAN-internal interfaces above as potential multivendor interfaces, where we need to comply and be prepared to do interoperability testing, at least with basic/limited performance/features," the vendor said.

"However, it is expected that the main deployment model for multi-vendor RAN will continue to be by RAN vendor geographic areas, using interoperable Inter-RAN Area Mobility i/f," Ericsson added.

That language is a long way from the layered, multi-supplier vision Ericsson described in early 2024. Then, head of networks Fredrik Jejdling told reporters: "I think the industry has been characterized by vertically integrated geographical splits and we believe that paradigm is gone with this shift."

"Therefore, the competitive premise shifts from being integrated and vertical to being strong and horizontal in the layers," Jejdling said.

What did AT&T actually buy?

In the US deal announced in late 2023 and finalized in 2024, Ericsson retained the two-thirds of AT&T's RAN footprint it already served and replaced Nokia, AT&T's only other macro vendor, across the remaining third. AT&T labeled the arrangement open RAN because of standardized interfaces between components.

The supporting cast is thinner than the label suggested. AT&T introduced 1Finity, Amphenol and Corning as alternative radio vendors, but only for small cells, not macro sites. Mavenir, another name in the original lineup, exited the hardware business last year.

The virtualized element is similarly narrow: just 21 sites in two cities ran Dell servers with Intel general-purpose processors as of May. By late 2025, Nokia held fewer than 16% of AT&T RAN sites, according to Ookla data shared with industry analysts. With Nokia nearly gone, the "geographic split" Ericsson says will define 6G deployment has effectively disappeared from AT&T's network.

How has Ericsson's stance changed?

Jejdling left his networks role about a year after the AT&T contract, and Ericsson's messaging has cooled since. The latest 6G commentary describes an "inter-RAN area mobility" interface that supports handover only in the borderlands between vendor fiefdoms — borderlands that do not exist on a single-vendor network.

Ericsson has not commercialized a purpose-built baseband that connects via the relevant open interface to a third-party massive MIMO radio. "We have not yet released a new version of RAN compute products," Gabriel Foglander, Ericsson's head of strategic RAN leadership, said in June. "That is still in the roadmap."

What Ericsson has shipped is massive MIMO radios compatible with open fronthaul category B ULPI. "The most important thing right now is to make sure that every new radio we bring out is capable of this because then we're seeding the market," Foglander said.

Does this leave AT&T trapped?

Independent analyst Alok Tripathi, a former Huawei technology expert, argues it does. "That leaves AT&T in an awkward spot," Tripathi said. "It has removed much of Nokia, so a regional split is largely off the table, and its multivendor plan depends on third-party radios plugging into an Ericsson-led foundation, the arrangement Ericsson itself describes as 'basic/limited performance/features.'"

AT&T's only remaining path to genuine multivendor RAN runs through Ericsson's cloud or virtual RAN products. Those were stuck at 21 sites in June. "I think the boom in the AI industry and the impact on memory pricing is not making it easy to hit the right TCO on that," Foglander said of cloud RAN economics.

Outside AT&T, the broader market has not moved much either. The five largest RAN vendors — Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung — still account for 95% of global RAN revenue, according to Omdia. Samsung, the closest thing to a virtual RAN success story, held just 5% of the market last year.

What happens next in 6G?

Most operators want to keep their 5G hardware and add 6G via a software upgrade in the same spectrum bands, which removes another opening for new suppliers. New 6G spectrum is likely to sit at 6 GHz and higher, where signals travel shorter distances and penetrate walls less effectively. To compensate, vendors plan to lean harder on more complex massive MIMO, which is harder to mix and match between suppliers.

Operators expect 6G commercial launches around 2030. If AT&T wants to retain an open RAN story beyond that window, it will need Ericsson to ship the disaggregated baseband product that has lingered on the roadmap — or accept that the $14 billion bet was, in vendor terms, a marriage of convenience rather than a multivendor experiment.