One of the objections to Open RAN from operators, especially in Europe, has been lack of support for legacy 2G/3G networks. This was raised as a concern by operators such as the UK’s BT last year, when many governments were developing huge enthusiasm for Open RAN as a way to diversify the supply chain while squeezing out Huawei. But that enthusiasm was often ill-informed when it came to operator practicalities, such as the need to maintain legacy networks, often well into the 2030s, and to migrate to 5G SingleRAN architectures in future, to save energy and cost by running 2G or 3G along with 4G and 5G from one platform. The concerns about 2G/3G support and backwards compatibility…