Debates around Open RAN are as frequent and heated as ever, but this year has seen an increasing dose of realism to temper the hype. With some of the shine dulled on Rakuten’s innovative but commercially challenging venture – both as an operator and an integrator – the focus has shifted to Europe, where the ‘Gang of Five,’ large supporters of Open RAN have been working to create an ecosystem and a set of blueprints that could enable deployment by a large number of operators, not just the greenfields or the technically advanced. These five operators (Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica, TIM and Vodafone) have been important in driving innovation and a modicum of scale into the platform, but even they…