Cloud-native core and vRAN: the industry waits for these catalysts of change The biggest challenge for the 5G business case in the early years of the technology is that the first wave of standards are out of step with what many operators want to achieve. If 5G really is to become a super-flexible, super-economical platform supporting a huge array of industries and use cases, two of the critical success factors will be cloud-native technologies and shared spectrum. Neither of these is currently fully available for commercial deployment. As we have argued before, this means a major dilemma for operators which feel pressurized – by their governments, customers, competitors or their own business plans – to launch 5G services early (2019-2021).…