The leading specialist vendors which have gained new prominence from the interest in O-RAN have been announcing a string of deals to support open specifications, and to combine their respective offerings. Some of these, like an agreement by base station vendor Airspan to support Altiostar RAN VNFs (virtual network functions), or a similar agreement between Altiostar and NEC, represent commercialization of work done for the Rakuten super-project. Others are arising from other trials and deployments, or just from the logic of joining forces to prove that multivendor vRANs are realistic, and to gain a bit of scale against the big vendors. The latest pact is between Mavenir and Altiostar, which plan to cooperate to specify open RAN radio units which…