The open, multivendor RAN has been discussed for over a decade, but not achieved outside of WiFi (and only imperfectly there). In 5G, traditional operators and emerging private service providers and neutral hosts are more urgently focused on the issue because of the twin needs to reduce the cost of building another new network, and to be far more flexible in supporting specific industries and use cases. Much of the early work is being done in small cells – they have a broader ecosystem anyway, and most at-scale deployments will be greenfield and so less challenging in terms of opening up or migrating a legacy network. A breakthrough came this week with Small Cell Forum’s release of its 5G FAPI…