Telecom Infra Project (TIP) was set up by Facebook (now Meta) to bring lower-cost equipment and a broader ecosystem to the telco network, in the same way that Meta’s Open Compute Project had done for data centers. However, enabling commoditized kit to support demanding urban 5G workloads, and integrating products from multiple vendors in one deployment, is harder in the RAN world than in IT, something that Open RAN enthusiasts increasingly acknowledge. This was clear in slides from a recent TIP board meeting, which were obtained by Light Reading. These point to some of the challenges of building multivendor RANs, and by implication, the important role of cross-industry organizations such as TIP to ease these problems by supporting deployment blueprints…