There are usually plenty of surprises at Mobile World Congress (MWC) along with the well-previewed launches and debates, but as the Barcelona show gets back to its full scale in 2023, one dead certainty is that Open RAN will be very prominent on the agenda. At last year’s scaled-down event, there was plenty of discussion about the technology that seeks to blow open the RAN supply chain and turn the mobile network into a cloud-based, programmable and multivendor platform instead of a set of base station appliances available from a handful of large vendors. But the discussion and demonstrations were still in the context of a largely pre-commercial technology (with the exception of Rakuten), and had the rosy glow of…