There is a long list of ways in which operators aim to change the economics of their networks when they move to 5G. One of the most important is to move towards fully cloud-based architectures, so they can take advantage of the same economies of scale and flexible, programmable architectures of the webscale world. In the first wave of deployments, most operators have taken only baby steps along this road – a virtualised, but not cloud-native, packet core perhaps; or a migration of some data center functions to the cloud. A few telcos, notably AT&T, are forming strategic alliances with cloud giants, often focused first on enterprise customers, but with a longer term roadmap towards rolling out whole networks on…