Two of the five operators that put their names on the O-RAN Alliance back in 2018 were AT&T and China Mobile. I keep circling back to that pairing, because in the summer of 2021 it has become almost impossible to say out loud. When I wrote about the founding, the pitch was about cost, and about not being trapped inside a single vendor’s roadmap. Nobody in that room was talking about sovereignty. Three years later it is close to the only thing anyone talks about.

I finished my Rakuten piece wondering whether anyone could pull off that blank-slate trick without an actual blank slate. Dish is the closest thing the United States has to an answer, and it is a slightly frustrating one, because Dish is also a greenfield. They are building the fourth nationwide American network from nothing, cloud-native, running the core and a good chunk of the radio access on top of AWS. So it does not settle the brownfield question, the one about whether a carrier with twenty years of existing towers can do this. What it does settle is whether Rakuten’s approach travels outside Japan, under a very different kind of pressure.

That pressure is the real story of the year. Britain banned Huawei from its 5G networks last summer and told operators to strip the existing gear out by 2027, then put real budget behind a diversification strategy that names Open RAN specifically. Washington is pushing the same direction with less paperwork and more phone calls. Somewhere in the last eighteen months Open RAN stopped being an architecture that engineers happened to prefer and turned into industrial policy, a lever governments can pull to get Chinese vendors out of the network.

Here is the part that bothers me, and I have not seen many people say it plainly. Open does not mean not-Chinese. Those are two separate properties that got welded together in the political conversation because it was convenient to weld them. You can build a fully open, multi-vendor 5G network packed with the same three or four Western suppliers, and openness will not have bought you a single gram of real diversity. You can also, at least on paper, build an open network out of Chinese components that happen to speak standard interfaces. The policy crowd is selling openness as a sovereignty tool. What it mostly does is trade one concentrated dependence for another. You add vendors and interfaces, and every new seam is one more place where something can break, or be broken.

I find that a little dishonest, or at least badly explained, and it is a strange thing to watch a movement whose founding members include China Mobile get repackaged as the machinery that keeps China out. Nobody is going to say that from a stage in Barcelona. The question I am carrying into the rest of the year is whether Europe, which has every reason to be nervous about depending on anyone at all, puts real money behind this, or signs one more memorandum and calls it a strategy.

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