The UK is becoming something of a hotbed for emerging open RAN systems, partly because its government has toughened its anti-Huawei stance this year, and is encouraging the four MNOs to open up their ecosystems. Those MNOs have seven years to remove Huawei from their core and RAN platforms, so there is no great urgency, and BT/EE and Vodafone, in particular, have expressed caution around open RAN architectures for their primary 5G networks. This is partly because the systems are not mature yet, and partly because some vendors, such as Samsung, do no support coexistence with legacy 2G/3G networks, which UK operators plan to retain, at least on the 2G side, for many years. However, the four operators – BT/EE,…