The cloudification of 5G gives the webscalers an opportunity to become network operators, whether or not they want to run actual connectivity (which tends to be a matter of tactical gap-filling rather than a core strategy). But running a core and, in time, the digital functions of a cloud-native RAN, is highly strategic, which explains why Microsoft has acquired Affirmed Networks, one of a small group of advanced start-ups which designed fully virtualized mobile core platforms for 4G and 5G. By becoming a network operator in this sense, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud can achieve three gains. Affirmed will help Microsoft work towards all three, in an area where Google, which has its own hosted core functions, threatened…