Some of the Phase One projects under the European Union’s huge 5G-PPP research umbrella are announcing concrete results now, and these will be significant for feeding into the current, Phase Two wave, which is more focused on commercial outcomes. One of the completed projects is 5G-Crosshaul, a three-year activity which has now delivered its concept for an integrated 5G transport network supporting flexibility across backhaul, fronthaul and midhaul. The project involved 20 organizations – including Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Ericsson, Nokia and NEC – coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The conceptual transport network the group has presented is used to interconnect distributed and virtualized 5G RAN and core network functions, hosted on cloud nodes within the network. The…