US government agency, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has delivered a review of its Open RAN ‘5G Challenge’ projects from 2022 and 2023. While this may seem like ancient history, it’s useful to review the lessons learned from these testbeds, particularly for small vendors who rely on these types of free projects to test their products. The top-line take-away was, of course, that the products from small vendors were not mature enough to compete with major vendors. More compliance between O-RAN Alliance specifications and 3GPP standards, and better integration of software, is needed. As part of the push from the US government to have a more diverse telecommunications supply chain, the NTIA ran two challenges – one in 2022…