The hype surrounding the USA’s 5G program died a little over the past week, with the prolonged 28 GHz spectrum auction attracting limited interest, and AT&T being castigated (again) for marketing LTE services as ‘5G’. However, behind the obsessive focus on the USA’s first, small-scale roll-outs, and its status as the home of the ‘world’s first’ mainstream 5G services, there are genuinely interesting plans afoot. This is largely thanks to the fact that AT&T and Verizon are actually doing what most operators have only spoken about, and tying 5G to broader new platforms such as virtualization and on-demand enterprise services. AT&T has set out its roadmap for 5G services, which sounds more concrete and real world than most operators’ ‘visions’.…