“Dish is the launch customer for Telco Cloud Platform RAN," VMware's Sachin Katti said. He also named Red Hat and Wind River as VMware's sole cloud-only competitors in vRAN.

“It’s clear that U.S. sanctions, chip shortages, and general anti-Chinese vendor sentiment are forcing Huawei to find a way to stay in business and reinvent itself," analyst Stéphane Téral

“A lot of organizations had seemingly good processes and controls in place pre-pandemic, but the disruption has just flipped a lot of organizations on their head,” AT&T Cybersecurity's Todd

“We have the equipment that has been ordered now," Dish Network EVP Marc Rouanne said. “We have everything we need."

"Openness allows you to have visibility and it allows you to put your defense and your security where you see the threats might be coming,” Dish Network's Marc Rouanne

NEC is one of the earliest 5G core and RAN vendors to announce its commercial use of OpenShift, but many others are coming, Red Hat's Ian Hood said.

“We’re a pretty acquisitive company and so we are always looking for partners as the overall architecture disintermediates,” VMware's Sanjay Uppal said.

“The goal and the outcome are the same," Cisco SVP Jonathan Davidson said. "The key is we all want to get to open RAN."

“It’s very important that when you’re going after enterprises that you build segment knowledge," Nokia's Raghav Sahgal said.

“We’re seeing so much transformation in the industry and we’re really aiming to be at the heart of that transformation as customers start to think about how they’re going

“We’re trying to create a new architecture that simplifies the layers and enables a much more interoperable future that we’ve always had in IP that now we’re extending into

“One of our key objectives at Cloud and Network Services is to pivot our software to an as-a-service model,” said Raghav Sahgal, president of the Nokia's business unit.

“One thing that’s become very clear in our industry is the importance of chips, the importance of silicon when it comes to 5G,” Samsung's Alok Shah said.

Some mid-band 5G gear from incumbent RAN vendors will support virtualized or open RAN frameworks, but that doesn’t mean either system will become dominant in U.S. networks soon.

“We have not talked much about edge computing or cloud computing because we’ve been busy working with our customers" to solve real pain points, T-Mobile EVP John Saw said.

A recent vRAN test in New Jersey riding on Nokia’s cloud-based vRAN 2.0 system is a key enabler of AT&T's open RAN vision.

Justice Through Code is a coding skills training program at Columbia University for formerly incarcerated individuals.

“Candidly, I think enterprises are still trying to find a formula that works for them,” T-Mobile US EVP John Saw said.

“Enterprises are looking to us, not just for mobility needs, but also for more advanced network solutions that 5G can bring to the table," T-Mobile's John Saw said.

Competing motivations are abundant in open RAN, and most of these groups are shoving the technology in a direction that best serves the goals of those leading the charge.

Analysys Mason revised its forecast for global IoT connections downward from its previous outlook, noting that the impact of the global pandemic is partly to blame.

“I’m sure there will be a change in tone. It’ll probably be less bombastic, but I personally don’t think that there will be major changes,” Omdia's Daryl Schoolar said.

AT&T’s 5G mobility core and many elements of routing and voice services are now virtualized, AT&T's Igal Elbaz said, calling it “an essential capability” during the COVID-19 crisis.

“Our objective is to make the underlying connectivity layer as accessible, and affordable, and agile as possible, so then other services can go on top of it,” Rakuten's Azita