Among the companies from the IT world that see open RAN as a route into the 5G market, Juniper has moved particularly quickly. Last week it announced its contribution to the emerging market for RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs), a key element of the O-RAN Alliance architecture. The RIC abstracts control functions that were traditionally embedded in the base station and runs them as xApps on cloud infrastructure. Juniper has established stronger credentials than some mobile market newcomers by co-developing its offering with an operator, Türk Telekom. It worked with Netsia, the US arm of the telco’s R&D arm, Argela, which has been at the cutting edge of technologies like network slicing for several years. The two companies claim the RIC…