Telefónica has been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of initiatives to open up the proprietary RAN market and replace the old appliance base stations with networks that are not just virtualized and disaggregated, but open and multivendor. It has conducted trials and deployments, and issued RFPs, for equipment supporting O-RAN Alliance specifications and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) deployment blueprints. Now it is seeking to drive more scale into the effort by creating a new consortium to support 4G and 5G O-RAN trials. Collective effort can help keep an open platform from fragmenting, and accelerate adoption by addressing challenges as a body, and boosting confidence and scale. This will be important if large operators really are to believe that open…