This time of year brings the usual speculation about the key themes at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in just a week’s time. The official GSMA theme is ‘Intelligent Connectivity’, which covers all the bases. But will it be the ‘year of 5G’ (again), the ‘year of edge computing’, the year of AI? All of these, and many more, will be important areas of technology focus. But behind all the glad-handing and wizardry, the real justification for vendors and operators to spend the best part of a quarter’s earnings in Barcelona is to achieve the conversations, agreements and even contracts, which will help to transform their business models in the ‘5G era’. For most large operators and vendors, 2019 will be…