Japan’s leading MNO, NTT Docomo, is driving scale into the open RAN industry by announcing an alliance of partners. Docomo has a long history of gathering favored vendors and working closely with them to develop cutting edge technologies. The difference this time is that the focus is on open specifications, and some of the cooperative work could be fed back into the wider O-RAN community. Its initial chosen vendors include long-standing local partners Fujitsu and NEC, with which Docomo has co-developed technologies for 3G, 4G and 5G – the new international prominence of these two owes a great deal to their cooperations with such a demanding telco customer over the years. This shows how open platforms could be leveraged to…