As mentioned above, many telcos are torn between the advantages of deploying key functions in the public cloud, to access the hyperscalers’ ecosystems and innovations and to reduce inhouse cost; and the risk of ending up locked into a certain cloud, and taking the role of very junior partner to AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. One compromise position is to rely on external clouds, but to select a large number of partners. Ensuring consistency across any cloud is something that open platforms such as Open RAN and ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol) can facilitate in a telco-optimized way, and as the network becomes more distributed, it will be even more important that operators can access the best edge locations…