Some of AT&T's top networking executives have begun talking up the benefits of open RAN. "We believe that open RAN is going to be a good benefit for us, and we actually plan to implement it in our network," Scott Mair, AT&T's president of technology and operations and one of the operator's top 5G executives, said this week at the Barclay Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. "We think it's really a good technology that will become available. But it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take some time." Mair added that AT&T started work on open RAN technology in 2018 with a handful of other vendors. Now, he said, there are hundreds of companies working on the technology all over the world.