O-RAN ALLIANCE Expands its Board of Directors

The O-RAN Alliance has announced its new board for the 2025-26 term. Following its General Members Meeting on the 17th December of last year, the Germany based Open RAN standards body elected to expand the number of seats at its top table. The expanded board goes from twelve members to fifteen, with the three new seats taken up by China Telecom, SoftBank and UScellular.

The move by the O-RAN ALLIANCE suggests a stronger focus on AI given the inclusion of SoftBank, one of the founding members of the AI-RAN Alliance and Yue Wang, who left Samsung Networks to become China Telecom’s Chief Technologist for Network and AI. The additions also now mean that all five of the leading operators in the USA, the top three operators in Japan and two of the three operators from China have representation at the board level, along with the top five European operators.

Commenting on the announcement, Abdurazak Mudesir, Chair of the Board of O-RAN ALLIANCE and Group CTO of Deutsche Telekom stated that “Guided by operator priorities, O-RAN ALLIANCE remains committed to driving the transformation of the RAN toward openness, intelligence, virtualization, and full interoperability, to enable large-scale deployments in mobile networks.”

However, in the wake of recent Open RAN announcements from South Korea, where the TTA recently announced it would adopt O-RAN Alliance specifications into its own standards, and the Indian government’s ambitions to use Open RAN to foster a homegrown market, the omission of representatives from these countries, or other new countries, feels like a missed opportunity to broaden the perspectives and requirements feeding into the organisation’s body of work.