Necessity is often the mother of invention, and Telecom Italia’s financial pressures and ownership quarrels are pushing it towards radical cost-cutting in its networks. Some of its tactics, such as network sharing with Vodafone and cooperation with Open Fiber, highlight the way all operators will have to run their future networks, not just those with debt mountains. The economics of 5G will make dwindling sense if there is not more focus on infrastructure sharing and convergence, with the distant but logical end result of splitting a wholesale, scaled-up ‘pipe’ from the service providers. Long before that day, operators can achieve significantly better cost bases if they abandon their instinctive hostility to sharing, and it will better for the whole industry…