As we have argued before, timing is all, and it’s a frustrating issue both for large MNOs and for the open RAN community. The escalation of the US-China tensions and the consequent sanctions against Huawei have turned the operators’ perennial grumbles about vendor lock-in into a matter of urgency. Yet while an open, disaggregated, multivendor architecture would clearly help to make lock-in and expensive rip-and-replace processes things of the past, the platforms that are being developed remain too immature to be deployed in primary macro networks, as a replacement for Huawei or anyone else, in the short term. Greenfield networks, and secondary build-outs indoors or at the edge, are a different matter, and there, many of the emerging open technologies…