The year ended as it had begun, with an intense focus on open RAN platforms and the prospects for a multivendor, disaggregated 5G architecture and ecosystem in the coming years. Mavenir, one of the companies in the emerging US-centric group of challengers supporting O-RAN platforms, took further steps into hardware, highlighting the concerns, held by many operators, that it may not be practical to mix and match radios and baseband virtual network functions (VNFs) in many scenarios. But the association of O-RAN with the USA, beloved of some US politicians and the Open RAN Policy Coalition, is far from assured. Mavenir itself is working with a Taiwanese radio partner, MTI (as is the USA’s Dish Network), while Japan’s NEC is…