One of the great dilemmas facing vendors in a standardized industry is how to maintain differentiation and margins while also supporting standards-based interoperability. As the mobile industry has matured, operators have placed multivendor interoperability higher and higher up their priority lists. So will they finally achieve full openness in the 5G era, free of the compromises with have dogged previous generations? In a recent survey of 68 Tier 1 MNOs by Rethink Technology Research, interoperability emerged as the third most important enabler of a successful 5G deployment model – 48% cited this as one of the three factors they considered essential to such a model, and it was outranked only by ‘lower total cost of ownership than 4G’ (72%) and…