The O-RAN Alliance, the main body devising specifications to underpin Open RAN platforms, needs to forge partnerships with official standards-setting organizations such as 3GPP, as these will be influential in adopting O-RAN specs within broader, and globally accepted, standards frameworks. The Alliance has been building these relationships gradually, and last week announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with US standards group ATIS, which is the main regional partner for 3GPP. The goal is to “further both organizations’ mutual objectives to advance the industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and global standards-compliant mobile networks”, said a joint statement. ATIS is influential in the US ecosystem, which has been a particularly intense focus of O-RAN development because many US policy makers believe…