From the newsletter (September 30; sign-up or follow if you want it sooner): IoT providers are pushing programmable, software-defined connectivity, while AI-RAN promises network efficiency rather than market growth. Operators including Orange, Optus and SK Telecom are testing practical AI use cases as RAN demand remains broadly flat.
There’s an interesting IoT write-up, here – the kind of news profile RCR used to do much more of – about Danish IoT provider Onomondo, which has a €100m “war chest” and an agenda to turn IoT from a SIM product into a software-defined infrastructure layer. Sounds familiar. Because it is the same discipline / logic-shift in the MNO market, and not just the reserve of a handful of progressives in the MVNO market – about programmability and dynamism, and the ability to spin-up high-end on-demand connectivity services. There’s good insight in there, too, about other cross-over features, common to the whole connectivity play: about SIM provisioning (SGP.32/eUICC), machine networks (private 5G), robot automation (physical AI).
But the best liner notes, maybe, are from the latest entry in RCR’s AI-RAN discography – as set down during Intelligent RAN Forum last week, and serialised in these pages since. Dell’Oro’s Stefan Pongratz was fairly blunt: the post-5G correction is over, but the RAN market is still expected to be broadly flat through 2030. AI RAN, cloud RAN, massive MIMO, and eventually 6G can all grow within that envelope without materially expanding it. The exception is private wireless, where enterprises bring genuinely new capital into the market (and for which OCUDU has new funding for factory demos, btw). Which makes the practical AI-RAN work now happening with operators – Orange, Optus, SK Telecom, as recorded here – more interesting than any of the grander claims about AI-RAN, or future telecoms.
There is a useful distinction here. AI for RAN can make existing networks cheaper, more efficient and easier to operate. RAN for AI is the much bigger bet: that AI agents, machines, and new traffic patterns eventually create enough demand to justify more capacity, spectrum and infrastructure. The first is already happening; but the second, still being sized up and sketched out, is the grand wager for the telecoms industry. As we know, and as we have written.
