“Sales slowed in North America following a strong first half of the year,” explained Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “Whether it was due to network demand caused by people working and studying from home or new projects at the beginning of the year, the demand for optical equipment in the region rose 11% in the first half of 2020.

Stefan Pongratz, Vice President of Dell’Oro Group, an independent market analysis, and research firm, says that the increased complexity with the various 5G technologies in combination with the shift towards Open RAN will potentially introduce new challenges to CSP operational teams tasked with managing end-to-end performance.

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.