The cellular vendors and operators have had little involvement in open source in the past, but such discussions highlight why they need to change that situation quickly by participating in open hardware initiatives like TIP and the associated Open Compute Project; and in software projects like OpenStack. Better still for the survival of the traditional telco, they need to establish their own technologies at the heart of open source de facto standards. AT&T’s early work with Domain 2.0 partners and with chip firms like Intel and Broadcom has been focused on internal platforms, but some of these could find their way into a more open environment, as has already happened, on the software side, with the operator’s ECOMP orchestrator for…