One of the great hopes for 5G is that it will usher in a wider, more open ecosystem of chip and base station makers, which will boost innovation and competition, and lower the cost of 5G deployment. The hopes rest on the extensive work being done on open interfaces and frameworks for next generation base stations, especially virtualized ones; and on the presumption that 5G will, over time, become very dense. That means it will rely far more heavily than 4G on small cells, a nascent sector in which there are lower barriers to entry – in terms of cost or powerful incumbents – for new entrants. Independent small cell vendors like Parallel Wireless are already highly active in open…