In September, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) added a welcome dose of heavyweight experience with open telecoms platforms when it announced its SD-RAN initiative, though it also injected a further note of confusion into the open RAN debate. Now it has made its intentions clearer with the publication of version 1.0 of SD-RAN, a cloud-native platform that provides developer frameworks based on O-RAN’s underlying architecture. A key focus of the O-RAN Alliance, and its most significant new contribution to vRAN architecture, is the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), which abstracts control functions that were traditionally embedded in the base stations. It has two strands, addressing non-real time and near-real time processes. The non-real time RIC is relatively uncontroversial, since many higher…