If one theme has dominated Wireless Watch over recent years, it is the radical change in the dynamics of the RAN market. This has been driven by several significant factors, including the expanded performance requirements of 5G use cases; the emergence of new service providers, especially for enterprise users; geopolitics and the impact on Huawei. The most important factor of all has been the start of the migration of the RAN to be a cloud-based network in which all the network functions from Layer 2 upwards, and some of the Layer 1 processes, are run in software on cloud infrastructure. This shift is only just beginning, since the RAN is far more challenging to cloudify than IT functions or even…