Since the 5G standards were split into Non-Standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA) strands in 2017, it was assumed that NSA, which could be deployed with the existing 4G core, would provide a way for operators to move to 5G quickly and relatively simply, but that they would quickly upgrade to ‘true 5G’ – supported by SA and the cloud-native 5G core. This would happen because they would need the additional capabilities of the SA core to enable new use cases and revenue streams, particularly in enterprise, where performance requirements would be far more diverse and demanding than in the 4G+, mobile broadband world addressed by NSA. In fact, only 39 operators have started deploying 5G SA in public networks, according…