NTT Docomo has switched on a Nokia-supplied open RAN base station in Japan, according to a brief Mobile World Live report. The activation extends Docomo's 5G open RAN supplier list, which until now has leaned heavily on domestic vendors NEC, Fujitsu and on Rakuten Symphony.

The deployment matters for two reasons. First, it puts Nokia inside Docomo's 5G open RAN footprint, where Rakuten Symphony, NEC and Fujitsu have done most of the heavy lifting through the operator's OREC consortium. Second, it tests whether Nokia's AnyRAN strategy can survive in a tier-one radio network.

What does Docomo already run on open RAN?

Quite a lot, by the standards of 2021. The operator launched commercial 5G in March 2020 and has steadily shifted share of new sites toward open architecture. OREC, the 5G Open RAN Ecosystem that Docomo co-founded in February 2021, set the carrier on a course to disaggregate.

Docomo's open RAN footprint now covers central Tokyo and a handful of regional hubs. The operator does not break out a site count, but it serves around 90 million mobile subscribers, so the open RAN share is still a small fraction of the macro grid.

What does Docomo actually get from Nokia here?

Nokia's AnyRAN line, launched in March 2023, pairs AirScale radios with software that can run on third-party servers. The pitch is interoperability with the O-RAN Alliance's open fronthaul specification, plus a path off proprietary baseband stacks. For Docomo, the pitch is not new.

Adding Nokia extends the supplier list without breaking the open interface promise. It also gives Docomo another vendor to play NEC and Fujitsu against in price negotiations, which is rarely a bad thing for a CFO with a capex line to defend.

Where does Nokia sit in the open RAN race?

Nokia is a late entrant to the open RAN business by its own admission. The Finnish vendor spent years arguing its ReefShark system-on-chip and traditional AirScale were the surer bet, then reversed course in 2023 when the market moved against it.

The company now competes head-to-head with Samsung, NEC, and specialist players such as Mavenir and Parallel Wireless for open RAN slots. Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and BT have run pilots. Vodafone has publicly targeted 2,500 open RAN sites across Europe by 2027, which is the kind of volume Nokia needs to make unit economics work.

How big is this really?

One site. That is the headline number, and it is small. Tier-one Japanese carriers have historically favoured domestic suppliers for political and supply-chain reasons, so any Nokia footprint inside Docomo is a crack in that wall. A single site, however, is a foothold, not a conquest.

By the Vodafone yardstick, Docomo's first Nokia open RAN site is roughly 1/2500th of the European operator's target. That ratio captures the gap between vendor press release and operator rollout.

What does the wider picture look like?

The open RAN market remains stuck. Carriers run small-scale trials, vendors promise interoperability, and open RAN's share of the global RAN market still sits in the low single digits. The UK's 35% open RAN traffic target by 2030, set out in the 2023 Wireless Infrastructure Strategy, is the closest thing the industry has to a forcing function.

Nokia's open RAN wins so far read like a tour of carrier pilots rather than a portfolio. A Docomo production site, however modest, breaks that pattern in one market. Whether the Finnish vendor can turn that into a second order, and a third, will define its 2025 open RAN story.

Verdict

One box, one operator, one vendor. Watch whether a second Nokia open RAN site lights up in Japan before the end of 2025. That is the only number the market will care about.