One of the cautionary tales for vendors that has emerged from Nokia’s current tribulations is – don’t rely too much, for market kudos and confidence, on one customer. Nokia has been central to the extremely high profile deployment of an end-to-end cloud-native 4G/5G network by Rakuten Mobile, Japan’s disruptive new entrant (see separate item for Rakuten’s commercial launch last week). Like the other 17 players in Rakuten’s diversified supply chain, Nokia has made considerable capital out of its involvement, and only two weeks ago, it announced its latest engagement, to orchestrate over 160 virtual network functions (VNFs) across Rakuten’s telco cloud as a managed services deal. This was a significant win, giving Nokia a strategic position in arguably the most…