Week Ending 18 December 2020 Another busy and productive week for Open RAN. This roundup covers the week’s most notable stories, and finishes up with a list of resources that should be useful to anyone with an interest – but limited time! Vendors Accenture broke cover as the systems integrator power behind high-profile Rakuten’s fully virtualized, cloud-native and open RAN-based business. It looks like this has been much more comprehensive support than has been publicly referenced to date, where much of the discussion has been about RAN disaggregation and hardware. No doubt the experience that Accenture has gained at Rakuten will be a trump card in priming other Open RAN rollouts globally – a position that seems up for grabs (but see NEC below). Nokia’s CEO reported a new focus on Open RAN – targeting leadership in Open RAN and vRAN for its Mobile Networks business unit. Nokia is already well established as being in the “pro Open RAN” vendor camp, but all the same it is notable to see this reinforced right from the top, especially given other recent organisational changes. NEC announced its selection by Telefónica Germany as the system integrator in charge of delivering its Open RAN […]