Amidst all the excitement surrounding Open RAN, one element is attracting more vendor attention than anything else – the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). This is the most novel element of the O-RAN Alliance’s particular set of specifications for an open, multivendor RAN, and it aims to become, in effect, the operating system for the 5G mobile network. However, there is a great deal of testing, development and confidence-building that needs to go on before it achieves that goal. The RIC is an ambitious initiative, which abstracts a wide range of network control functions and runs them as xApps on a common platform. It has non-real time functions, which relate to management and orchestration, and the more challenging near-real time apps,…