One of the dangers of any attempt to achieve open platforms is fragmentation between competing approaches, especially if large vendors (or even countries) use them as proxies for their own wars. While O-RAN appears to have achieved significant momentum in the macro RAN – and dovetails with the ambitions of Nokia, Samsung, NEC and the US government, among others – there are other initiatives developing interesting interfaces, such as the Open Networking Foundation and Small Cell Forum. Meanwhile, Ericsson has yet to throw whole-hearted weight behind any of the options, despite some hedging about O-RAN, and could rock the boat in future. Other vendors, like Cisco, are trying to create their own ‘open’ initiatives. Cisco’s is called Open vRAN and…