As we have often noted, Open RAN will gain commercial scale first in small cells, particularly for enterprise and private networks, as well as in rural extension. It will not only be less risky to introduce brand new technologies and vendors to an enterprise network than a public macro RAN, but there is already a broader ecosystem in place around small cells. We can expect a stream of innovations from this ecosystem as commercial roll-outs begin this year, and two caught our eye last week, from chip provider Picocom and distributed unit (DU) developer CommAgility. Picocom has been developing a system-on-chip, PC802, for Open RAN small cells and unveiled its commercial offering at the end of last year. Now it…