NTT Docomo's Quiet Breakthrough: Commercial Multi-Vendor Open RAN Goes Live with Nokia
- September 14, 2026
- 10 mins
- Technology
- 5g multi vendor nokia ntt docomo o ran alliance open ran telecom
NTT Docomo’s Quiet Breakthrough: Commercial Multi-Vendor Open RAN Goes Live with Nokia
On a Monday morning in Tokyo, while much of the telecom world was still digesting the previous week’s press releases, NTT Docomo did something that the industry has been promising — and mostly failing — to do for the better part of a decade. The Japanese operator announced it had begun commercial operation of Nokia’s latest base station equipment in a genuine multi-vendor configuration, connecting radio units from different vendors under a single deployment compliant with O-RAN Alliance specifications.
The announcement, carried by Telecompaper on 14 September 2026, was characteristically understated. There was no keynote stage, no flashy demo, no carefully choreographed video of robotic arms assembling radios. Just a statement that commercial traffic is now flowing across a network where the baseband and the radios do not necessarily come from the same company — and that this is happening in production, not in a lab.
That restraint is precisely why this story matters. For years, multi-vendor Open RAN has lived in the comfortable ambiguity of trials, proofs-of-concept, and “commercial-ready” claims that never quite crossed into commercial reality. Docomo’s move is the kind of quiet, unglamorous milestone that actually shifts an industry’s trajectory.
What Docomo Actually Deployed
The technical details are worth unpacking carefully, because they tell you exactly how far Open RAN has come — and where the remaining friction lives.
According to the announcement, Docomo is using Nokia’s Levante baseband card for data processing and its Ponente baseband card for control processing. These are Nokia’s latest-generation baseband platforms, and the operator is connecting them to radio units from different vendors in a deployment that complies with O-RAN Alliance specifications. Docomo claimed this is the first commercial operation of Nokia’s latest base station equipment in a multi-vendor configuration.
The split between data and control processing across separate cards is not incidental. It reflects the architectural logic that has driven Open RAN from the beginning: disaggregating functions so that they can be sourced, upgraded, and optimized independently. When you separate the control plane from the user plane at the baseband level, you create the conditions for a genuinely multi-vendor radio access network — one where the radio unit, the distributed unit, and the centralized unit can each come from a different supplier without the whole thing collapsing into interoperability chaos.
That is the theory. The practice has been harder. Multi-vendor Open RAN deployments have historically stumbled on the unglamorous stuff: fronthaul latency, synchronization, performance parity with single-vendor systems, and the operational complexity of managing a network where no single vendor owns the end-to-end stack. Docomo’s announcement is significant precisely because it suggests those barriers are becoming surmountable in a commercial context.
The use of O-RAN Alliance specifications as the compliance baseline is also notable. It signals that the standards work — however slow and contentious it has sometimes been — is producing interfaces that vendors can actually build against and operators can actually deploy. The O-RAN Alliance has taken its share of criticism over the years, but this is the payoff: a Japanese operator running Nokia baseband with third-party radios in commercial service.
Why Japan, Why Docomo, Why Now
The choice of Docomo as the operator to cross this threshold is not surprising. Japan has consistently been one of the most receptive markets for Open RAN, driven by a combination of industrial policy, a desire to diversify supplier risk, and operators with deep engineering benches that can handle the integration complexity that multi-vendor deployments demand.
Docomo, in particular, has been building toward this moment for years. The operator has been an active participant in Open RAN standardization and has run a series of interoperability and multi-vendor trials. It also has a long-standing relationship with Nokia, which has positioned itself as one of the more credible vendors in the Open RAN space — a positioning that has required Nokia to do something difficult: embrace disaggregation while still selling integrated solutions.
That tension is central to understanding this deployment. Nokia’s Open RAN strategy has evolved considerably. The company has moved from a defensive posture — protecting its integrated base station business — to a more confident, software-first stance. The Levante and Ponente baseband cards are part of that evolution. By offering baseband platforms that can interoperate with third-party radios, Nokia is effectively betting that the future of RAN is disaggregated, and that it can win in that future by being the best baseband and software supplier rather than by locking operators into end-to-end proprietary stacks.
It is a calculated bet. If multi-vendor Open RAN becomes the norm, Nokia’s willingness to play in that world gives it a seat at the table. If it does not, Nokia still sells integrated solutions. Either way, the company is hedged. Docomo’s commercial deployment is a validation of that strategy — and a signal to other operators that the multi-vendor path is no longer purely theoretical.
The Multi-Vendor Milestone the Industry Has Been Waiting For
To understand why this announcement deserves attention, it helps to recall what the Open RAN conversation has sounded like over the past few years. The narrative has been dominated by two competing storylines.
The first is the grand vision: Open RAN will break vendor lock-in, drive down costs, accelerate innovation, and usher in an era of software-defined, AI-native networks. The second is the skeptical counterpoint: Open RAN deployments have been slower and more expensive than promised, integration complexity is real, and the economics have not yet proven compelling enough to justify the disruption for most operators.
Both storylines contain truth. But the debate has often been conducted at a level of abstraction that obscures the concrete engineering milestones that actually move the needle. A commercial multi-vendor deployment using O-RAN-compliant interfaces, running live traffic, with baseband from one vendor and radios from others — that is a concrete milestone. It does not settle the economic debate, but it does demonstrate that the technical foundation is real.
The significance is amplified by the specific configuration Docomo chose. Using separate baseband cards for data and control processing is not the simplest possible multi-vendor setup. It is a more sophisticated disaggregation that reflects a mature understanding of how to build flexible, upgradeable RAN infrastructure. If Docomo can operate this in commercial service, it becomes harder for skeptics to argue that multi-vendor Open RAN is inherently unworkable.
The Broader Context: A Week of Open RAN Momentum
The Docomo announcement did not arrive in a vacuum. The same week brought news that Japan and Germany had agreed to deepen cooperation across ICT following the ninth Japan-Germany ICT Policy Dialogue in Berlin. Officials from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation discussed AI, 5G and Beyond 5G/6G, online protection of minors, wireless power transmission, and data policy — with Open RAN explicitly named as an area of cooperation.
That juxtaposition is telling. Open RAN has become a diplomatic as well as a technical agenda item. Governments see it as a way to diversify supplier ecosystems, reduce dependence on a small number of vendors, and align like-minded countries around shared standards. Japan and Germany deepening cooperation on Open RAN and 6G is a signal that the geopolitical dimension of network architecture is not going away.
Meanwhile, the commercial momentum continues to build. Nokia has been expanding its AI-RAN work with operators including T-Mobile, NTT Docomo, SoftBank, BT, and Vodafone, demonstrating GPU-accelerated RAN workloads and practical pathways toward AI-native networks. The AI-RAN Alliance has reached a significant membership milestone and presented a broad set of real-world demonstrations. Market analysts project the AI-RAN market growing from roughly USD 2.95 billion in 2025 to USD 46.69 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of around 28%.
All of this matters for how we read the Docomo deployment. Multi-vendor Open RAN is not an end in itself. It is the foundation on which the next phase of RAN evolution — AI-native, cloud-native, energy-optimized, and increasingly autonomous — will be built. You cannot run AI-driven RAN optimization across a closed, single-vendor stack with anything like the flexibility that an open, disaggregated architecture allows. Docomo’s commercial multi-vendor deployment is, in that sense, a prerequisite for the AI-RAN future that so much of the industry is now racing toward.
What This Means for Operators
For operators watching from the sidelines, the Docomo deployment offers several practical lessons.
First, multi-vendor Open RAN is moving from trial to production. That does not mean it is easy, and it does not mean the economics are settled. But it does mean that the technical risk profile is changing. Operators who have been waiting for proof that multi-vendor configurations can run commercial traffic now have a concrete reference point.
Second, the baseband layer is where much of the multi-vendor action is happening. Nokia’s Levante and Ponente cards represent a bet that operators will want to mix and match radios while standardizing on a baseband platform that can handle the complexity of disaggregated deployments. Other vendors are pursuing similar strategies. The competitive dynamics at the baseband layer will shape how quickly multi-vendor Open RAN spreads.
Third, the operational model matters as much as the technology. Running a multi-vendor RAN requires different skills, different processes, and different vendor management approaches than running a single-vendor network. Docomo’s engineering depth is part of why it could pull this off. Operators with thinner technical teams will need to think carefully about how they build those capabilities — or rely on integrators and managed services to fill the gap.
Fourth, the standards work is paying off. O-RAN Alliance specifications have sometimes been criticized as slow-moving and overly complex. But the fact that Nokia baseband and third-party radios can interoperate in commercial service is evidence that the standards are doing their job. That is worth remembering as the industry debates the next generation of Open RAN specifications.
The Road Ahead
Docomo’s announcement is a milestone, not a finish line. Multi-vendor Open RAN still faces real challenges: performance parity with single-vendor systems, energy efficiency, cost of integration, and the maturity of the software ecosystem that manages disaggregated networks. The AI-RAN wave will add new requirements and new complexity.
But milestones matter. They change what is considered possible, and they shift the burden of proof. For years, the question was whether multi-vendor Open RAN could work in commercial service. Docomo and Nokia have now answered that question in the affirmative — quietly, in production, on live traffic, in one of the world’s most demanding telecom markets.
The next question is how quickly others follow. If the answer is “faster than expected,” the Open RAN conversation in 2027 will look very different from the one we have been having. And the operators who moved early — building the integration skills, the vendor relationships, and the operational muscle that multi-vendor deployments demand — will be the ones best positioned to capitalize.