AT&T has outlined its Open RAN progress, reporting that the company is on track with its goal to operate a fully Open RAN mobile network in the country.

Rob Soni, VP, RAN technology, AT&T, noted this week during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that the carrier has made significant progress during the last year.

This time last year, Soni told DCD that AT&T had started to deploy Open RAN assets on its network, building on the carrier’s $14 billion Open RAN deal with Ericsson.

This week, Soni highlighted further progress in a blog post, noting that AT&T has completed more than 50 percent of its radio replacement (swap) program.

He added that during this time, AT&T has completed an Open RAN call on its commercial network using Ericsson basebands and Fujitsu’s 1Finity radios.

“In parallel, more than 50 percent of our network traffic is now carried on open-capable hardware (infrastructure designed to support open architectures over time), marking a meaningful shift in the foundation we’re building on,” said Rob Soni, VP, RAN technology, AT&T.

His comments came as CEO John Stankey stated this week that by the end of this year, that figure will rise to 70 percent on AT&T’s network.

AT&T also announced that it has paired with its key Open RAN partner Ericsson to successfully demonstrate Ericsson’s AI-native link adaptation on a Cloud RAN stack powered by Intel Xeon 6 SoC.

According to the carrier, the test utilized AT&T’s frequency bands with portable Ericsson software to “enhance RAN speed, flexibility, and performance.” The demo featured Xeon 6 SoC in AT&T’s target Cloud RAN setup.

“This demo highlights how AI capabilities, powered by our next-generation Cloud RAN platform, can be deployed seamlessly to drive innovation and deliver superior customer experiences,” said Soni.

As explained by AT&T, AI-native link adaptation dynamically adjusts to changes in signal quality and interference, boosting RAN performance on purpose-built and cloud-based infrastructure alike.

The company notes that Intel’s Xeon 6 SoC is engineered specifically for network and Edge deployments.