Last year I ended a post about the geopolitics wondering whether Europe would put real money behind Open RAN or just sign one more memorandum. A year on, the answer is that it did both, and the memorandum came first. Early in 2021 Telefónica, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Vodafone put out a joint declaration committing to Open RAN across their European footprint, which is exactly the kind of document that can mean everything or nothing depending on what follows it.

What followed it was more than I expected. Deutsche Telekom stood up what it calls O-RAN Town in Neubrandenburg with Mavenir, a real slice of live network rather than a lab. Vodafone switched on its first UK Open RAN site out in the southwest of England and started talking about thousands more. And the one that actually holds my attention is 1&1, Germany’s fourth mobile operator, building a network from nothing on Rakuten Symphony and Mavenir with no Chinese vendors anywhere in the plan. That closes a loop I opened back in my Rakuten piece, where I guessed Rakuten would try to sell its model to the operators who could not build it themselves. 1&1 is that customer, and it exists.

The strange thing about Europe running a diversification campaign is that Europe already owns two of the three companies everyone wants to diversify toward. Nokia is Finnish. Ericsson is Swedish. The Huawei problem is genuine, but sovereignty in the radio network is an odd banner for a continent that already supplies most of the non-Chinese market. What Europe actually lacks is not a vendor, it is a second source that is not one of those two giants, and Open RAN is the bet that open interfaces can manufacture that second source out of Mavenir, Rakuten Symphony and a handful of smaller names that keep turning up in the announcements.

I would feel better about all of it if almost every deployment were not sitting at the edges, on rural coverage and on a greenfield operator building from zero. Nobody has ripped out a working macro network in a European capital and rebuilt it on open interfaces. The dense urban core of every large network on the continent is still Ericsson, still Nokia, still in a few countries Huawei for a while yet. Until someone touches that foundation, the European commitment is real but shallow, a layer of press releases over ground nobody has actually dug into.

So the question I am carrying forward is no longer whether a greenfield or a fourth operator can run Open RAN. Rakuten and now 1&1 have settled that. It is whether one of the incumbents, an Ericsson or a Nokia whose whole installed base is the thing open interfaces threaten, will ever really back this model instead of nodding along in public and hoping it quietly loses momentum. That is the moment I am waiting for, and I do not think it comes from Europe first.

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