Open source is already in Europe’s telecoms networks and software stacks. Being able to control and efficiently leverage it, as well as contribute back, is the harder question, and one the industry has faced as its use of open source has matured over the last decade. While numerous operators lead the way, the potential of open source in the telecoms industry is just beginning to be fulfilled. Sustained cooperation between the industry, public sector, and the open source ecosystem will remain critical in the years ahead as it seeks to remain sovereign and competitive.
This is the story narrated in OpenForum Europe’s new vision paper, published today, entitled “Open Source Software in Europe’s Telecoms Industry: Capabilities, Ecosystems, and Policies for a More Sovereign and Competitive Future”. The report was conceptualised and written by OFE as the second in a vision paper series, following on from a previous report about open source in the automotive industry. It seeks to highlight lessons learned and a future vision for open source in some of Europe’s most critical industries. The report draws on desk research and 17 semi-structured interviews conducted between February and May 2026 with operators, vendors, foundations, standards bodies, EU institutions, regulators, OSS projects, and independent experts.
How did we get here?
Over the past decade, successive waves of virtualisation, softwarisation, disaggregation and cloudification have pulled apart the vertically integrated, hardware-centric model that defined the telecoms industry for most of its history. This is particularly relevant in Europe, which has a much more diverse and competitive landscape in telecoms. What has largely replaced these vertically-integrated monoliths are horizontal, software-defined stacks, and open source software sits underneath a great deal of this ‘software-defined networking’. Projects like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Sylva, and CAMARA are no longer experiments like 10-15 years ago, they are now widely-used and deployable industry defaults.
Larger telecoms operators like Orange and Deutsche Telekom are huge drivers of the cultural and operational change leading to more intentional open source support and contribution.. Orange strategically leveraged procurement, rebuilt its stack around open control points, and made every request for proposal enforce them, inverting who dictates terms to whom – and by its own account needed three to four years before that investment credibly paid off. Deutsche Telekom and other operators took CAMARA to a neutral foundation rather than keeping it in-house, which is precisely why it grew. Both examples are instructive, and are examples of what leadership oriented around open source might look like and show the benefits it can have.
The challenge ahead
While both open source consumption and contribution have increased over the last decade in the industry, holistic support – using, contributing, funding, and governing – remains uneven. It is concentrated amongst the larger and more successful actors, and even then, there are challenges in capability building, as well as ecosystem conditions and policy frameworks that constrain or limit it and its benefits. In this sense, the barrier to a more sovereign and competitive European telecoms industry is structural: the internal engineering depth, the organisational will, and the market conditions that let an operator convert consumption of open source into control over it.
What happens next for the telecoms industry in Europe depends less on technology than on where the leverage sits. Right now, it sits in a small number of places. A handful of equipment vendors and suppliers tend to mediate most of what operators consume. A contributor base dominated by firms outside Europe shapes the projects underneath. Vendors have systemic challenges investing in the R&D and capabilities they need due to challenging market forces. This is the accumulated result of thirty years of outsourcing, a market fragmented across roughly 170 operators, and challenges imposed cumulatively through a highly regulated policy environment. Changing it will require intentionality, will, and determination.
A vision for a new era
The report works through and narratives. these challenges in three parts. Capabilities looks at what operators can actually do themselves: engineering depth, how strategically they use procurement, and whether they contribute upstream at all. Ecosystems turns to what no single operator controls: the competition dynamics, and the vendors and integrators sitting between operators and the code. Policies covers the frameworks shaping all of it, from funding instruments to regulatory burden to the sovereignty agenda now at the centre of EU digital policy. Three case studies – Orange, Deutsche Telekom, and Telenor – run underneath as concrete illustrations of how differently this plays out depending on an operator’s size and position.
The report’s recommendations are aimed at addressing some of these challenges: reskilling a workforce oriented toward legacy hardware, making open source control points and multi-vendor interoperability standard contractual terms, building the OSS-native integrator layer that barely exists in Europe today, and so on. Timing is a key part of the argument. The Digital Networks Act, the Tech Sovereignty Package and its EU Open Source Strategy, and the €409 billion European Competitiveness Fund are all being negotiated right now, and will be settled long before 2040. Treated as separate files, they change little. Treated as connected levers that might help the industry unlock more value from open source, they might help the industry move towards where the leverage sits.
Download the report and check it out over on the OFE publications page. If you have any feedback, please get in touch with us at info@openforumeurope.org.
