The 5G network may provide a final opportunity for second tier equipment vendors to secure a place in the RAN, and for start-ups to gain scale. The closed ecosystem, which has effectively been reduced to three huge vendors and two challengers (ZTE and Samsung), is being broken open by a combination of factors, including: geopolitical pressures on Huawei and ZTE, which are excluding or limiting their role in some 5G build-outs and restricting operator choice still further. the shift to virtualized RANs and to smaller cells, both of which have been catalysts for interest in open, multivendor architectures such as those promoted by ORAN Alliance, Telecom Infra Project (TIP) and Small Cell Forum (SCF). both vRAN and small cells have…