In January, the O-RAN Alliance added new institutions in the USA and Japan to its list of Open Testing and Integration Centers (OTICs), which it has established to address one of the biggest challenges facing Open RAN adoption, the speed of certifying compliance with O-RAN standards. The two new centers are OTIC Japan and Cosmos in the USA. Cosmos is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 5G-centric project, Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR). Such initiatives are important to the Open RAN community as it pursues its goals of enabling large-scale, best-of-breed multivendor networks through open interfaces, and so opening up the RAN supply chain. Various barriers have limited the impact, so far, of the fledgling Open RAN platforms,…