Intelligent RAN and the Road to 6G at the 9th O-RAN 6G Workshop

The 9th O-RAN 6G Workshop, organised by the O-RAN ALLIANCE’s next Generation Research Group (nGRG), was held online on 5 June 2025. Under the theme Intelligent RAN in the 6G Era, the event brought together leading experts and researchers to share insights on how intelligence, cloud, and openness are shaping the future of radio access networks.

This edition was part of the wider O-RAN ALLIANCE face-to-face meetings hosted in Fukuoka by Rakuten Mobile. With over 300 delegates from more than 80 organisations attending in person and many more joining online, the event once again demonstrated that the O-RAN community remains deeply engaged in progressing toward the 6G vision. Rakuten Mobile showcased its own large-scale O-RAN-compliant deployments and highlighted how its live nationwide RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) platform is contributing to AI-native network evolution.

The workshop explored a range of timely topics including the convergence of AI-RAN and O-RAN ALLIANCE initiatives, the role of cloud-AI-native platforms, the importance of open source and digital twins, and how economic and policy perspectives will shape the future of spectrum sharing and intent-based networking. Speakers included representatives from Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, China Telecom, SoftBank, SUTD, MIT, NTUST, and many more. One notable session was the panel discussion on collaboration between 3GPP and the O-RAN ALLIANCE for 6G development, which provided a useful perspective on the interplay between global standards and open innovation.

However, despite the depth and relevance of the content, there are still barriers to broader visibility. Accessing these sessions after the fact is less straightforward than it should be. Videos are hosted on proprietary platforms, making them hard to embed or reference publicly. There is little promotional effort from the O-RAN ALLIANCE to make this valuable material accessible or visible to the wider community. This is unfortunate, especially when many similar events by other organisations are freely available on mainstream video platforms.

For those interested in diving into the technical details, the agenda and recordings are available on the O-RAN ALLIANCE website here. The workshop provides a useful snapshot of how the RAN of the future is being reimagined through AI, openness, and next-generation collaboration.

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