Special Report: The new 5G ecosystem The latest release of 3GPP standards for 5G, Release 17, has been frozen, heralding the generation of ‘5G-Advanced’ (see Key Issues section). But the biggest changes in the networks are coming not from the radio and core specs – radical as some of the new introductions are compared to 3G and 4G – but from the migration to underlying architectures based on cloud infrastructure, with associated technologies that were also pioneered in the data center, not the network. Those include the application of AI/ML to networks, and the implementation of full automation, software-defined networking (SDN) and edge compute. Building networks based on these IT-centric principles will inevitably shake up the ecosystem. The progress…