The many promises made for 5G boil down to two categories – cost and versatility. On the one hand, they must deliver significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO); on the other, the flexibility to support hundreds of use cases with differing network behaviors, and to amend or replace them rapidly in response to changing requirements – thus generating new revenue streams for operators, across many industries. In these very early days of commercial 5G, there is a broad spectrum of opinion about how, when or even whether the platform will be ready to fulfil its promises. Nobody would argue that the current iterations can do so, in any but the most limited way. The next release of standards from…