China Mobile may have compromised on its initial plan to be the only MNO in the world to go straight to the Standalone (SA) version of 5G, which requires a 5G core. In fact, the company will deploy some Non-Standalone 5G in areas where it wants to make early progress, but it is still likely to be the first telco to get to SA at any scale, and it is already running trials on this platform, even using technologies which are not yet standardized. The operator, working with Huawei and cloud provider Baidu, has been testing network slicing with an SA architecture and a technology called 5G Vertical LAN. The latter will be defined in the 3GPP Release 16 standards,…