It was another good week for the Open RAN movement, with several operators, notably AT&T and Telecom Italia, firming up on their commitments to deploying future 5G networks based on the open specifications. Perhaps even more important for the building of that key enabler of success, a broad ecosystem on top of a common platform, was Qualcomm’s announcement of a cooperation with Vodafone around Open RAN (see below). As we have pointed out many times, for any tech platform to gain critical mass, but also to stay open to many vendors, it needs to have the support of major merchant chip providers – and those companies need to be able to match or outdo the performance of single-purpose ASIC chips,…