Vodafone is using its considerable weight to try to accelerate development of a robust Open RAN ecosystem and platform, and its latest effort is to open a dedicated Open RAN chip design center within its new R&D labs in Málaga, Spain. About 20 chip developers will be involved in this project to design open foundations for the next generation of mobile networks, putting Vodafone at the heart of an ambitious attempt to define a new silicon architecture for RAN. The operator wants to stimulate developments that will speed up the process of making Open RAN sufficiently powerful and reliable to support heavily loaded 5G macro networks, a tough challenge when its aim is to deploy the technology at scale by 2025.…