Telecom's Lofty AI Ambitions Hinge On Breaking Open Proprietary Radio Networks
siliconANGLE, Thursday, March 5th, 2026
Artificial intelligence is driving an unprecedented surge in compute demand, but telecom operators face a structural barrier to capturing value from the shift: the proprietary technologies that control their own radio access networks. The industry's push toward Open RAN is now intended to loosen that control and open the door to broader innovation.
Telcos have historically chased every major technology wave - from cloud computing to e-commerce - yet struggled to compete at scale with the technology sector's speed and capital advantages. And as inference workloads grow more compute-intensive and agentic artificial intelligence frameworks demand tighter policy controls, the gap threatens to widen further, according to Sarbjeet Johal (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Stackpane Ltd