Summary

  • NTT DOCOMO says commercial operation began on 9 September for Nokia base-station equipment using Levante and Ponente cards in a configuration connected to O-RAN-compliant radio units from multiple vendors.
  • The announcement does not make this DOCOMO’s first multi-vendor Open RAN deployment. The new test is whether this specific equipment boundary can widen choice at live sites without adding unmeasured integration and support costs.

A radio network can be “open” on paper and still leave an operator with little room to change suppliers. The more revealing question is where a component can be replaced, what must be retested and who carries the work when a live service depends on it.

NTT DOCOMO’s 11 September announcement puts one such boundary into commercial use. The company says Nokia’s latest base-station equipment began operating on 9 September with radio units supplied by more than one vendor. The platform contains Levante for data processing and Ponente for control processing. DOCOMO describes the setup as O-RAN Alliance compliant and says it is the first commercial operator to use this Nokia equipment in a multi-vendor configuration, according to DOCOMO’s own research as of 9 September.

That qualification matters: the claim concerns this named equipment and configuration, not the first multi-vendor RAN in Japan or the first Open RAN network worldwide.

There is a longer DOCOMO story behind the announcement. Its 2025 account of Open RAN commercial deployment says the company had multi-vendor operating experience since the 4G era and built its 5G Open RAN network nationwide from the outset. Its earlier technical white paper describes the work required to combine functions from different suppliers and connect them to existing operations. The September release therefore marks a more specific milestone: Nokia’s latest base-station equipment now participates in a commercial configuration with radio units from multiple suppliers. It is an extension of a programme, not its beginning.

That distinction prevents an easy but misleading conclusion. “Open RAN” does not mean that any radio can be attached to any baseband and immediately carry customer traffic. The standards define interfaces and functions; an operator still has to select the features and parameters it will support, verify combinations, integrate alarms and management, and decide how faults are isolated. DOCOMO’s 2025 best-practices paper calls for operator-led interoperability profiles, information sharing between vendors and sufficient pre-verification.

It also describes phased adoption: opening the radio-to-baseband fronthaul can be a low-impact starting point, while virtualization and more mature orchestration can follow later.

The commercial rationale is clear. DOCOMO says the new equipment supports LTE and 5G, can accommodate more radio units than its previous Nokia base-station equipment and is expected to use less power. Multiple compliant radio units could let network planners choose higher-power equipment for broad coverage or compact units where urban space is constrained or event traffic concentrates. Those are plausible design options. The release does not publish the radio-unit vendors or models, the number of sites, the deployed configuration, power readings, capacity results or a before-and-after service comparison.

Expected efficiency is not measured efficiency.

The stated rollout plan also needs a time boundary. DOCOMO said it intended to deploy nationwide, initially concentrating on urban areas, stadiums and event sites. It also announced a plan to install the equipment in a mobile base-station vehicle for the Joso Kinugawa Fireworks Festival on 12 September, pairing it with Nokia’s Dual Boost optimization technology. The press release described that as a future plan and did not report a result. It is a useful indicator to follow, not evidence that the event test improved service.

The business question is whether component choice becomes more real at the places where traffic and installation constraints differ. A compact radio at a crowded venue may solve a space problem; a higher-power unit may extend an area. But the operator’s savings depend on the full lifecycle: procurement, software support, integration labour, spare inventory, fault diagnosis, upgrades and rollback. A second supplier can improve negotiating leverage and supply resilience only if a substitute can be tested and operated without rebuilding the rest of the system. More vendors can also mean more interfaces to coordinate.

Heng Lu’s Note 64 offers a useful editorial lens: start with a minimum specification, leave later decisions close to the operator that must make them, and let adoption remain voluntary. That note addresses Internet coordination architecture, not telecom RAN standards. Applied here only as a question, it asks whether the shared interface is sufficient while DOCOMO retains the ability to choose the radio mix for each area. A standards claim is the starting point for that test, not its conclusion.

For now, DOCOMO has disclosed commercial operation of a Nokia platform connected to different vendors’ compliant radios. It has not disclosed the scale or the operating evidence needed to judge portability, efficiency or service impact. The next meaningful report would name the combinations and deployment footprint, explain acceptance testing, and compare live performance under stated conditions. Until then, the milestone is real but bounded: a new component pairing has crossed into commercial use; the economics of repeatable substitution remain to be shown.

Sources: DOCOMO’s English announcement; Japanese release; DOCOMO’s 2025 O-RAN deployment lessons; its 5G Open RAN ecosystem paper.

Sources