The agonies experienced by Cisco as the largest US telco/comms equipment and technology vendor over cellular and especially the RAN have been illuminating and sometimes excruciating to behold. They underline the dichotomy in the USA between mobile service deployment, where the country has advanced from being a laggard in the 3G era to a leader today, and over the underlying technology, where it has become heavily dependent on overseas companies. That partly explains the USA’s onslaught against the Chinese vendors and especially Huawei, where the national security card was played to justify a campaign whose real motivation was fear of these companies becoming too dominant in global 5G on account of their competitiveness. This has led to overdependence on Ericsson,…