Special Report: Open networks The push for open platforms is nothing new. Common hardware, decoupled from software, crept into the computing industry with the advent of merchant microprocessors in the 1970s and portable operating systems in the 1980s. More recently, open platforms have been driven by the cloud industry and, with technologies like OpenStack and Network Functions Virtualization, started to penetrate telecoms, first in the back office, then in the network itself. Open, disaggregated platforms are now spreading throughout the network in the 5G era, though they are certainly not confined to 5G or to mobile. Vodafone’s latest push into open networking concerns fixed broadband gateways (see separate item). Many initiatives are tied into the rising interest in private…