A notable feature of the path to 5G is that wireline organizations are almost as prominent in its development as the established wireless bodies like 3GPP and ETSI. CableLabs has been very active in 5G-related R&D, and now the Broadband Forum says it has been making “rapid progress” on 5G and related enabling technologies like the Cloud Central Office (CloudCO). At a meeting hosted by Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, the Forum said it was preparing to stage and test implementations of five CloudCO projects at the first Open Broadband Lab. The CloudCO projects encompass architecture and hardware, as well as software implementation and migration. They represent one of the first use cases for the recently launched Open Broadband initiative. The…