Vodafone is one of the primary supporters of open RAN technology and has already issued several RFIs under the auspices of Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to help push the emerging ecosystem forwards. While its early trials have mainly been in emerging markets in Africa, it has also made a commitment to open its whole European base station footprint up to systems supporting O-RAN specifications. Now its UK subsidiary has doubled down on that overall strategy, announcing a plan to use open disaggregated RAN technology in at least 2,600 sites, about 20% of the UK total by 2027. This attracted big headlines and is one of the biggest quantified commitments by a non-greenfield operator to date. Of course, there are caveats.…