Vodafone and Qualcomm have announced a highly significant partnership to develop blueprints that aim to lower the barriers to smaller vendors entering the closed world of RAN equipment. Success would be a big step towards achieving a key aim of the Open RAN initiative – to broaden the choice of suppliers for telcos, in order to boost competition and innovation and reduce the power of incumbent vendors. However, it can be questioned how open the blueprint can be if it remains defined only by one chipmaker. The initial reference designs will be based on Qualcomm’s new 5G RAN platforms, including Radio Unit (RU) with Massive MIMO support and Distributed Unit (DU). This is the latest example of a major operator…