The promise of Open RAN networks that would create an ecosystem of new vendors for macro mobile networks is largely dead. What has survived are vRAN networks with open interfaces and operators pretending not to remember what all the fuss was about. While the idea of openness in RAN has been around for decades, momentum for the modern Open RAN movement picked up speed after 2018, when geopolitical concerns alerted governments to the need for supply chain diversity in the telecoms sector. Governments, like the US and UK, that wanted to remove Chinese vendors that they considered a security risk, adopted the Open RAN message. Open RAN promised to open the mobile network and bring in a wider group of…