US awards $117 million in funding for Open RAN kit

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the funding award, which comes under the second phase of its Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund. As its name suggests, the scheme is geared towards financing the development of the Open RAN ecosystem.

Nine companies secured grants under this latest funding round, with Airspan Networks, a well-known name in the Open RAN space, picking up the biggest slice of the available cash; it will get $42.7 million for a project to build a power-efficient 4G/5G O-RU extensible platform.

There's a full list of all nine projects below.

The Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund has a fairly broad remit: it's a scheme designed to support the development of open and interoperable wireless networks and it's backed by $1.5 billion in government funding.

This particular slice of the pie is all about hardware though. All nine awards are focused on open radio unit innovation and commercialization. The NTIA required applicants to partner with a mobile network operator to help produce products that will be commercially viable.

"Our awards today are tackling a major wireless network expense head-on with support to bring more open radio units to market," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson, in a statement late last week.

"These projects will shore up the hardware supply chain and create new opportunities for companies from the US and its allies along the way," he said.

Awards like this, and similar projects being carried out elsewhere in the world, are geared towards supporting an industry segment that so far has failed to live up to its promise.

As Dell'Oro noted late last year, Open RAN revenues fell by 30% on-year in the first nine months of 2024, subdued by a lack of activity in the US and Japan, amongst other things. The aforementioned Airspan is operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Open RAN having not been as big as money-spinner as it had expected.

But still the industry ploughs on with it, still hopeful that the promised growth in the market is ahead.

This $117 million award takes the total committed under the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund to over $530 million. It is the second batch of grants under the scheme's second funding call.

The first round of grants ended in February last year with a $42.3 million award to a project to create Open RAN R&D facilities in Dallas and Washington DC, headed up by telco heavyweights AT&T and Verizon.

The NTIA then opened up the second round, which carries a $420 million warchest, and received applications for more than seven times the available funding. In all, there were 227 applications collectively requesting in excess of $2.94 billion. It awarded its first batch, totalling $273 million, in December, the headline recipient then being equipment giant Nokia, which picked up a $45 million grant to support a project to develop a next-generation Open Radio Unit Platform.

That leaves just under $30 million still in the pot for the second round. But this will be the last award under the current administration, with Donald Trump due to step back into the Oval Office this time next week.

There should be the best part of $1 billion still to award over the lifetime of the Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, which could be vital for the flagging Open RAN movement.