With Mobile World Congress 2024 looming, the Open RAN community is preparing to dominate the conversation in Barcelona, as it has, in different ways, for the past two years, though recent high-profile deals for tier 1 vendors show their dominance over smaller providers. In 2022, the first full-scale MWC after the pandemic hiatus, the mood around Open RAN was in keeping with the return to ‘business as usual’, upbeat and optimistic. Last year saw something of a reset in expectations, as vendors and operators acknowledged that a transition to a multivendor, cloud-based architecture for the RAN (the most expensive and business-critical investment they ever make) came with significant risk and time-to-deploy. The definition of ‘Open RAN’ was widely scaled back,…