Every so often, over the past two decades, a company proposes a flexible, wholesale mobile platform in the USA, to open up the market for enterprise services to a wide variety of providers. Clearwire pushed this idea when it was building a WiMAX network in the early years of the century. When it was acquired by Sprint, the larger operator – which had largely pioneered the MVNO model in the USA – kept the flame alive for a while, particularly when it formed a shortlived venture with several cablecos to create an alternative network and model to those of AT&T and Verizon. Sprint reverted to LTE and a conventional approach, but Google was setting out visions of how a more…