The mobile operator no longer has the luxury of dealing with a relatively closed and well-defined set of technologies and partners. The mobile network is increasingly intertwined with fixed line connections, and also with broad virtualized, programmable platforms, which will be essential to enable new business models and justify the investment in 5G. That sees operators getting deeply involved in a host of new technologies and standards, and increasingly emerging from the secrecy of inhouse labs and working through open source projects. Two important areas of effort are edge computing and machine learning (ML). Both are the focus of several open initiatives, in which certain operators, notably AT&T, are prominent. Both are starting to be deployed, often starting with the…