Orange has put "full decoupling" at the center of its open RAN ambitions, signaling that the Franco-Belgian operator group wants to separate its radio network hardware from software and integration layers more aggressively than the current wave of deployments has delivered.

At the same time, the group is not sold on AI-RAN, the concept promoted most loudly by NVIDIA and several vendor partners in which artificial intelligence compute is embedded directly into the radio access network to improve performance and unlock new workloads. Orange's position, as reported by Light Reading, is one of caution: the operator sees open RAN's decoupling agenda as the priority, and treats AI-RAN as an unproven proposition for now.

The distinction matters commercially. "Full decoupling" is a stronger commitment than the quasi-open architectures many European operators have so far accepted. In most early open RAN deployments, a single vendor still supplies the radio unit, the distributed unit and the centralized unit software, and often performs the systems integration. That arrangement preserves much of the single-vendor accountability model that large operators say they need for network stability, but it dilutes the original promise of the O-RAN Alliance: a genuinely multivendor RAN in which best-of-breed components can be swapped independently.

By targeting full decoupling, Orange is effectively saying that the interim, single-integrator model is not the end state it wants. The operator group, which serves markets across France, Spain, Poland, Belgium, Romania and several African and Middle Eastern countries, has been one of Europe's more visible open RAN advocates, and its procurement posture carries weight with vendors shaping their product roadmaps around operator requirements.

The skepticism toward AI-RAN places Orange at odds with a significant slice of the vendor marketing effort of the past year. AI-RAN proponents argue that running AI workloads on RAN compute will optimize traffic handling, improve energy efficiency and eventually monetize the network as an inference platform. Operators, however, must weigh those claims against capital discipline, integration risk and the fact that the RAN remains one of the most demanding real-time environments in telecom. A claim of AI-driven RAN gains is, at this stage, a vendor proposition rather than a demonstrated operator result, and Orange appears to be treating it as such.

There is also a standards and regulatory backdrop to Orange's position. The O-RAN Alliance specifications define open interfaces between the radio, distributed and centralized units, and between the RAN and the orchestration and RAN intelligent controller layers. European policymakers, including the EU executive in its 5G supply chain deliberations, have leaned on open RAN as a route to broaden the vendor base after the exit of certain suppliers from the market. An operator of Orange's scale pushing for full decoupling gives that policy agenda a concrete commercial anchor.

For vendors, the message cuts both ways. Equipment makers that have built their open RAN businesses on integrated stacks — supplying the radios and the software and standing behind the whole system — face pressure to make their portfolios genuinely separable. Software specialists and systems integrators, by contrast, gain a potential opening if Orange's decoupling target translates into tenders that split hardware supply from RAN software and from integration responsibility.

The open question is timing. Decoupled architectures raise operational questions that integrated ones do not: who is accountable when a multivendor chain underperforms, and how interoperability testing keeps pace with feature releases. Operators that have trialed full multivendor configurations have repeatedly found that the engineering burden sits heavily on their own teams.

Orange's stated position — decoupling as the goal, AI-RAN as unproven — suggests the group will sequence its RAN modernization around architectural separation before it commits capital to AI-native radio. How quickly that translates into large-scale, fully decoupled deployments across its European footprint will depend on vendor readiness and on whether the integration economics improve.