More than any other vendor, Ericsson is showing the strain of a technology transition. It has pinned many hopes for an uptick in its fortunes on 5G, but that will not be deployed in sufficient volumes to drive a real turnaround until the early 2020s. Meanwhile it has to cope with the decline of LTE investments, with fewer alternative sources of growth to tide it over than its main rivals, Huawei and Nokia have. Huawei has its enterprise and devices business while Nokia has been building up its offerings for vertical markets and harnessing the IP assets it acquired with Alcatel-Lucent. Ericsson, by contrast, has responded to a string of poor quarters by pulling back from some of the new…