ZTE and China Mobile have announced new advances in the progress towards full three-layer decoupling of the 5G network. This is an important concept which goes beyond separation of hardware and software, to a separation of applications from the cloud operating system (OS) from commodity hardware. Not only does that reduce operators’ hardware costs by freeing them from expensive single-purpose platforms, but it provides maximum flexibility to allocate network resources where they are required and support new service delivery platforms and network slicing. The latest test between the two Chinese firms used OpenFlow and OVSDB protocols, to enable a decoupling and interconnection test of ZTE’s SDN controller with China Mobile’s carrier-grade Cloud OS. The test involved environment installation inspection, basic…