The Near-RT RIC (near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller) handles control loops on the order of tens of milliseconds to one second, typically covering functions like mobility management and traffic steering. The Non-RT RIC operates on a longer timescale, above one second, and typically handles policy, training, and higher-level orchestration. Patent claims in this dataset, including WO2024033545A1, frequently turn on exactly how analytical data or control instructions move between these two tiers, so the direction and content of that interface is often the point of novelty being claimed.

Filing in this dataset is led by a mix of network operators building their own O-RAN stacks and established telecom equipment vendors, with Rakuten's group of entities showing the strongest co-filing relationships among all assignee pairs tracked. Momentum has slowed across the largest filers in the most recent year, with several showing sharp year-over-year declines, which is consistent with the overall filing trend flattening after its 2022 peak. No single filer holds a dominant share of the 252 families, so the field reads as contested rather than controlled by one player.

Filings rose from zero in 2017 to a peak of 86 in 2022, then flattened rather than continuing to climb. This pattern is common once the core architectural claims around RIC interfaces and control-loop timing have already been staked out by early movers, leaving later filers to compete for narrower improvement claims rather than foundational ones. It does not necessarily mean commercial deployment has slowed; publication lag of roughly 18 months also means the 2025-2026 figures in this dataset are still incomplete.

The most-cited records in this dataset concentrate on connection management, mobility robustness, and load balancing functions implemented through machine-learning techniques such as graph neural networks, and these carry the highest citation counts, which is a signal of how often later filers had to distinguish their claims from them. Separately, interface-specific claims like WO2024033545A1 block particular data flows between Non-RT and Near-RT RIC tiers rather than the RIC architecture generally. A freedom-to-operate review should check both the control-function claims and the interface-mechanism claims separately, since they are not the same claim family.

The IPC composition shows a heavy concentration in H04W and H04L, with far fewer records touching G06Q (commercial/billing logic), G01N (material or signal testing), and G05D (control of non-electric variables) — each in the low single digits out of 252 total records. That gap suggests applications tying RIC decision-making to non-wireless inputs, such as physical-layer sensing or commercial policy logic, remain largely unclaimed. Jurisdiction coverage is also uneven, with China's filing count notably lower than the US and PCT totals, which is worth factoring into any filing strategy targeting that market.