Most leading mobile operators, when interviewed, make similar pronouncements about 5G: it is more than a radio upgrade; it needs to support brand new revenue streams, especially in the enterprise and IoT; it is about convergence with fixed and non-3GPP wireless technologies, to create a ‘network of networks’; it will only deliver all its commercial and socio-economic goals if it is deployed in parallel with a far broader overhaul of the network platform, from end to end, with the introduction of virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), and networks that are disaggregated into a granular set of mix-and-match components. It is dispiriting, if not altogether surprising, that the rush to stick a 5G flag in the ground means early movers are mainly…