Nokia, in our opinion, led the industry in turning the network into a software-driven animal from nose to tail, long before actual software-defined networking (SDN) was applied to mobile infrastructure. But while Nokia and Ericsson are now introducing SDN and virtualization capabilities at a rapid pace, and establishing their own cloud platforms to control the new infinitely reprogrammable network, Huawei has taken a leap ahead of them with its new CloudAIR solution. The Chinese company held its annual Mobile Broadband Forum in Tokyo last week, and amid all the predictable corporate presentations, demonstrated several technologies which drove home the sheer pace of innovation that is going on within the firm’s labs. While its European rivals struggle with the pain of…