Two years ago, five leading European operators – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefónica and Vodafone – signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate in developing a Europe-centric Open RAN platform and ecosystem. Now, the same group is collaborating on another project that could increase regional strength in a strategic technology area – R&D for a telco cloud stack for Europe. The work will be carried out under the auspices of open source body Linux Foundation Europe. Like Open RAN, the telco cloud is essential to many national and EU government objectives related to regional leadership in key technologies and reduced reliance on Chinese equipment. It will also relate to objectives for greater control of privacy, data sovereignty, security…