Japan’s second operator, KDDI, is less prominent than its rivals NTT Docomo and Rakuten Mobile in the discussion about radical new network architectures, but it tends to work away in the background in its own disruptive way, and occasionally surface with some interesting results. A few weeks ago it claimed that it had turned on the first 5G Standalone (SA) Open RAN cell site, and last week, it showcased a development that looked more significant, because it was a rare breakthrough in open networking that was outside the hyped-up RAN. As analyzed in today’s lead article, the targeted benefits of open multivendor platforms will be constrained if operators focus only on the RAN, especially as so many challenges still remain…