It’s been an eventful summer for the fledgling Open RAN industry. As is to be expected with any new platform and associated ecosystem, there are uncertainties, sudden changes in the market, over-expectation combined with exciting breakthroughs. All this is made worse, in this case, by the fact that Open RAN has been hijacked as part of the geopolitical ‘5G race’ between the USA and China, and the attempt by several countries to build a homegrown 5G industry while sidelining Chinese technology. The political angle is rarely entirely missing from development of critical infrastructure – there were plenty of international politics at work behind the original definitions of GSM, for instance, and the later emergence of US-influenced CDMA. But Open RAN…