In a laboratory thrumming with electromagnetic activity, two enthusiastic engineers opened a metal box and showed Wireless Watch a Samsung Galaxy S22 mobile connected to the internet. The meeting was in late December, and fittingly so, as the two men were filled with the joy of young children opening Christmas stockings. We were in Parallel Wireless’ Bristol office, inspecting its latest 5G SA Open RAN technology in action. The cause of the excitement was a network with a distributed unit (DU) that could perform on a general purpose central processing unit (GP CPU), this was a promising breakthrough in the Open RAN community: a hardware-agnostic software stack. Parallel Wireless’ processor-agnostic RAN offering is adaptable for Intel’s x86, as well as…