Absolutely. Part of the challenge is that Open RAN opens up more (and new) interfaces that have to "play nice" and interoperate. Another part of the challenge

Absolutely. Part of the challenge is that Open RAN opens up more (and new) interfaces that have to "play nice" and interoperate. Another part of the challenge is the commercial business models part - monolithic RAN vendors can integrate vertically and horizontally to offer a fully tested suite that goes beyond just what's in the standards. To get like-for-like performance in things that matter, you often need more than the base standards. For example there's all manner of proprietary data exchanged between radios to coordinate performance and interference, which is vendor proprietary. That's needed to win an edge over others and win contracts, in the eyes of big vendors. The issue right now is that even just getting 2 standardised boxes to work together needs exactly that testing you refer to - different versions of ASN.1 schemas for example, can break interop. There's often vendor tweaks to edge cases to fix interop. In the old world of a single vendor networks there was some "goods out" testing carried out on equipment to ensure it worked together as a solution. When you buy components and put them together, you need to do that testing (hence labs like this). One final interesting challenge will be around funding future R&D. Big telecoms vendors need to invest many billions per "G" to keep up and get patents into standards. Open RAN is likely to drive disaggregation and cost savings for operators, which will reduce margin and "fat" in contracts. That might make it harder for innovation in the "next big thing", if they can't make a profit from charging a margin on some COTS servers or software platform. Which isn't to say that more competition is a bad thing, but just that disaggregation might cause a slow-down in future innovation if reduced margins can't sustain it. Operators want Open RAN for cost savings, and that means someone's margin needs squeezed.