The rising pressures on Huawei (see separate item) provide an opportunity for the emerging open RAN architectures, and their suppliers, that previous attempts at a new open mobile platform did not enjoy. When a vendor is incumbent and doing a decent job, the disruption and risk of swapping equipment and trusting to a less familiar partner often outweighs the temptations. But when a vendor has to be compulsorily removed – and at a time that coincides with the adoption of new technologies in 5G and virtualized networks – there is far more incentive for operators to try something new. In the parliamentary hearings that led up to the UK government’s decision to ban Huawei from the country’s 5G networks, two…