Many of our recent in-depth reports have focused on technical and political changes in Open RAN, and interesting developments continue to emerge on a weekly basis – including, last week, a partnership between NTT Docomo and NEC to work on an implementation of the O-RAN RIC (RAN Intelligent Controller – see item below). This highlighted the importance of Japanese operators and vendors in the fledgling Open RAN ecosystem, and the determination of major players to build on Rakuten’s high profile efforts and preserve a Japan-first 5G platform. This harks back to the innovations of the 2G and early 3G eras, when Docomo, in particular, was a major contributor to cutting edge deployments and to industry standards. Despite the continuing influence…