The vision of a new, open, multivendor and disaggregated network was largely epitomized, at Mobile World Congress, by Rakuten, but of course, that is a highly specific deployment by a unique operator in an unusual mobile economy. For most operators, the activities of the various open RAN industry groupings will be more relevant to their own hopes of exploding the current locked-down supply chain. In fact, Rakuten is not a poster child for any push towards industry-wide standards for an open network, and those will be essential to reduce the complexity and integration expense of rolling out multivendor 5G systems. The Japanese company did refer to Open vRAN, an initiative kicked off by Cisco at last year’s MWC, which has…