One of the issues that concerns many Open RAN supporters is how far openness can be maintained right down to chip level. Intel has established a powerful headstart in the virtualized macro RAN through its FlexRAN reference architecture, and has inherent advantages in applications that really can run on common off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. But operators and vendors do not wish to enable the kind of lock-in that Intel has traditionally enjoyed in the data center server world. These issues were front and center of many conversations at last week’s FYUZ conference, which combined the Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP’s) previously standalone event with the O-RAN Alliance’s Open RAN Summit and a new Metaverse Connectivity Summit, backed by Meta itself (which also…