Verizon CTO: Industry needs to re-examine meaning of open RAN

Is open RAN dead? Santiago “Yago” Tenorio, the open RAN trailblazer who left Vodafone for Verizon, hears that question a lot. The short answer: No. The longer one but perhaps not what everyone wants to hear: Maybe the industry needs to re-examine what it really means by “open RAN.” Spun out of a desire by operators to break the vendor “lock-in” that vendors like Ericsson and Nokia commandeered, open RAN—short for “Radio Access Network”—was launched as a way to enable operators to mix and match products from different vendors. The advantages of an open RAN strategy: more competition in price and availability. That was the idea, anyway. But it’s more complicated than that. Because, of course it is.