AI Is Not Changing the RAN. Should It?
AI is being added to the RAN everywhere you look. Adding capabilities is not the same as changing what the network is.
Dell’Oro Group published its updated AI RAN Advanced Research Report in June 2026, and there is a lot to read between the lines about their forecast.
Cumulative AI RAN revenue is projected to reach $35 billion over the five years from 2026 to 2030. That figure happens to match what the entire industry spends on RAN products in a single year, roughly $35 billion according to both Dell’Oro and Omdia, down from a peak of $45 billion in 2022. So, pretty much a stalled market maintains a similar investment path pre-6G Era.
But the more interesting part is that Dell’Oro’s base case assumes AI RAN will not expand the overall RAN market at all. Stefan Pongratz, the firm’s Vice President of RAN research and one of the most consistently accurate forecasters in this business, expects AI RAN to generate little, if any, incremental RAN revenue by the end of the forecast period.
Yup. The most discussed architectural shift in mobile networks since virtualization is projected to add approximately zero net dollars to the market it is supposed to transform.
Before anyone objects that AI is clearly everywhere in the RAN right now, let me save you the trouble of making that comment.
It is. I will list the evidence myself in a moment, and it is genuinely impressive, but my point in this article is different. Adding AI capabilities to the RAN is not the same as AI changing the RAN, and the distance between those two things is what the next five years will be about.
What Dell’Oro actually said, and why it carries weight
Dell’Oro has earned its reputation the hard way, by being right when the industry consensus was wrong. The firm called the post-5G capex decline before most vendors publicly acknowledged it, and its RAN tracking is treated as the reference dataset by operators, suppliers, and investors alike. So the details of its June 2026 forecast deserve attention.
Four findings stand out.
First, the base case says AI RAN becomes an important technology enabler as operators add virtualization, intelligence, automation, and even Open RAN capabilities (Is Ericsson Open RAN?) to their roadmaps, but it does not grow the pie.