Nokia has recently been beset by claims from rivals that its commitment to Open RAN is only skin-deep and that it has failed to open up its baseband units and radio units for anyone except Rakuten Mobile. The Finnish vendor hopes to allay such fears with a new trial with NTT Docomo, arguably a more challenging customer than Rakuten because of its legacy systems, and an operator that is claiming to be winning the Open RAN race (see Wireless Watch December 6 2021). One of the Rakuten’s early victories, as its CTO Tareq Amin hailed it, was to persuade Nokia to open up its radio units to work with third party basebands (Altiostar software running on cloud hardware). However, this…