Among the chip start-ups that crowded the halls in Barcelona, many were focused on the promise of an open ecosystem enabled by the USA’s CBRS shared spectrum. This is being heavily adopted for private and enterprise services – often by alternatives to the spectrum-owning MNOs – which rely on small cells. That scenario, which may be replicated in other markets that push shared spectrum to boost new 5G deployers, provides significant opportunities to build a new ecosystem with openings for new suppliers. Picocom, a UK/China-based start-up focusing on Open RAN baseband chips, is targeting the CBRS opportunity, as well as other 5G Open RAN markets. In CBRS, it announced its first public customer, BLiNQ Networks, a US vendor of fixed…