No real surprises at TTV’s Open RAN summit. But that’s not to say there weren’t interesting developments. It turns out a year can be a long time in telecom. Looking back at my writeup on the same event this time last year, things have progressed quite significantly for Open RAN. By my reckoning, 50% of this year’s participants were new to this year’s summit (and all of last year’s participating operators and vendors continue to be active in Open RAN). Vodafone’s Iago Tenorio reported open RAN pushback fading over the last year. The RAN Intelligent Controller was the star of the show, and even if the Security spectre did show up, it wasn’t there to poop the party. While all speakers largely agreed on just about everything, it was discussion of the RIC that elicited positive excitement. Why? Because it is the OpenRAN-specific innovation with the greatest potential to impact the customer experience, genuinely unlock new value potential AND reduce cost by intelligent tweaks to power consumption. And this space is moving very fast, with at least 16 vendors active in the space from VMware and Juniper to opensource offerings. (we’ll be covering the RIC space in an upcoming report, […]