‘Open intelligence’ is the buzzphrase to accompany the launch of the O-RAN Alliance’s second major release of specifications. Other important areas of focus include acceleration in the physical layer (a key challenge in virtualized Open RAN), and security testing. In total, 40 new specs have been published, the result of work by 11 working groups. Release 2.0 sees the Alliance deepening its work on orchestration and network control, which will help make its platform more appropriate for large-scale and complex networks that need to support very high performance, low latency functions from a cloud-based platform. This should set the stage for real-world Open RANs (outside of rare greenfield deployments like Rakuten’s) to adopt some of the advanced elements of the…