By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-03-01 07:05:00
It’s a random drizzly day in DC and officials at various US government agencies are feeling suitably despondent about the state of 5G. Their mood is conceivably shared by executives in the private sector, including some at Nvidia, the giant US chipmaker. For all the initial enthusiasm, 5G has not brought much improvement on 4G apart from adding capacity. It was never built for AI, the technology that took flight nearly five years after it was first standardized. Worse, the gatekeepers outside China are still Ericsson and Nokia, European companies that keep a tight grip on the keys to the network.
A movement called open RAN had hoped to change all this by offering industry-standard interfaces as substitutes for the proprietary ones found in traditional networks. It has largely failed to influence market dynamics and attention is shifting at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) tradeshow in Barcelona to the alternative safecracker of open source, rather than open RAN. The Department of War has joined forces with the Linux Foundation, perhaps the world’s best-known open-source group, on an initiative called OCUDU that aims to inject open-source code into the heart of the 6G network. A signed-up member of that effort, Nvidia is trumpeting “open” and “open source” as part of a separate albeit related 6G project that includes some very big names.
It is not yet another club or alliance in a sector already rife with them, says Ronnie Vasishta, who heads up telecom activities for…
