Industry events such as Mobile World Congress (MWC) turn up losers as well winners, and network slicing was one technology that looked more like the former. Yet closer inspection revealed that progress is still being made but just much more slowly and erratically than had been predicted or hoped by its vendors. It could also be argued that network slicing will be driven by two strong and related trends that were evident at MWC, private enterprises networks and edge compute. It was hard to get away from them both on the floor and at social events. Certainly, network slicing did not generate many headlines at the event, nor did it feature that much in seminars and presentations. But two major…