Above, we argued that the 5G RAN and core will, with Releases 16 and 17, become capable of delivering the wide range of functions envisaged for ‘5G’. However, these will only turn into profitable new revenue streams and an agile commercial platform if operators also transform their operations, processes and the systems which surround the network itself. One of the problems for early 5G deployers is that they had expected, a few years ago, that 5G would be inextricably linked with virtualized core and RAN. In reality, NFV (network functions virtualization) has come almost to a standstill amid criticisms that it is hard to scale, and as may operators turn away from first generation technologies and wait for fully cloud-native,…