The greenfield Open RAN operators, notably Rakuten Mobile of Japan and the USA’s Dish Network, are fascinating for their at-scale deployment of architectures that, for most established operators, are futuristic or out of reach. But the commercial results of investing in a radically new mobile network are less impressive to the older MNOs, as Rakuten Mobile continues to drag down financial performance at its parent group, and both firms announce new spending that somewhat shadows their aggressive claims to have achieved dramatically new capex levels for deploying 5G RAN. In the third quarter of 2022, Rakuten Mobile dragged down operating income for its parent group – a giant in ecommerce, cloud content and digital services. The group blamed ongoing investments…