If the Open RAN community ends 2022 on a rather disappointed note, it will be partly because the expectations set for the platform were always over-ambitious. Expecting operators to deploy a brand new architecture at rapid pace and broad scale, in their macro networks, would always have been very optimistic, even if that architecture would not also be a) their first foray into virtualized RAN; b) based on interfaces that were not, except in the case of Open Fronthaul, completed and hardened; and c) needing to coexist with ‘legacy’ networks that had sometimes only been rolled out 2-3 years before. To add unfamiliar and small-scale vendors into the mix too just added to the perceived risk. This is not to…