Every week seems to bring new advances in the RAN, and the hope that two huge challenges – a fully cloud-native RAN, and one that is fully open and interoperable – may be achievable in the 5G era. In the most recent development, Rakuten Mobile has started production of open RAN base stations, designed with NEC, while virtualized RAN (vRAN) pioneer Altiostar, another Rakuten supplier, is working with Robin.io – which provides automated lifecycle tools in the IT market – on containerized RAN (Robin.io is also a partner of another O-RAN supporter, Parallel Wireless). Although Nokia provided the radios for Rakuten’s 4G network (and continues to supply the core, optical transport and managed services), NEC has largely replaced it in…