With the first phase of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction kicking off on Oct. 29, vendors are gearing up for deployments with their service provider customers, but meaningful revenue may not occur until 2022.

Open RAN technology — which refers to the separation of the hardware and software components of the radio access network (RAN) — has gained a lot of attention over the past year. And with good reason. Open RAN opens the door to more potential RAN vendors and makes hardware and software from different vendors interoperable, which in turn leads to cost savings for operators and more flexibility in the mobile network.

“SASE isn’t necessarily a completely new technology, but its integration of existing technologies in a differentiated way,” said Mauricio Sanchez, research director at Dell’Oro Group, in a call with SDxCentral.

“Open RAN is clearly gaining momentum with some RAN segments but the technology is also not ready for prime time with all RAN technologies,” wrote Stefan Pongratz, an analyst at Dell’Oro Group, in response to questions from Light Reading.

“SASE holds great appeal because it unifies and simplifies networking and security across a wide variety of network use cases, ranging from larger headquarter and branch networks down to individual users,” Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director commented. “Over the next five years, we expect the initial thrust for SASE to come from small to medium enterprises, for whom unification and simplification rank high, but also expect larger enterprises to begin pivoting.”