Ericsson may have only privately acknowledged that ripping Huawei equipment out of mobile networks in Europe will, in the short term, hold back the continent’s advance into 5G. But it has publicly sided with Huawei in questioning the wisdom of rushing toward towards O-RAN (Open RAN) at a time when rapid deployment of infrastructure is critical for competitiveness at national levels. Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm said on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week: “Europe as a continent needs to not be behind on 5G. And why is that so important? 5G is going to drive a lot of enterprise applications, in healthcare, in logistics, in smart city planning etc … For high performance applications today, ORAN is not…