NUS-CIR/ProtO-RU

ProtO-RU is a niche research implementation focusing on the O-RAN 7.2 split, which is the industry standard for Open RAN deployments. Its primary value is providing a software path for researchers to test O-DU (Distributed Unit) implementations without needing expensive, proprietary RU hardware. However, with only 22 stars and zero recent activity, it lacks the momentum to be considered a market-leading tool. It competes directly with much more mature ecosystems like OpenAirInterface (OAI) and srsRAN, both of which have established communities and more robust O-RAN support. The defensibility is low because the project is essentially a functional mapping of a public standard (O-RAN) to a standard hardware driver (UHD); it serves as an excellent educational or research artifact but lacks a technical or data moat. Frontier AI labs are unlikely to enter this space as it is deeply entrenched in telecommunications hardware and protocol standards, but the project faces high risk of displacement by the aforementioned open-source giants in the telco space.