Network sharing, as we have analyzed several times this year, will be increasingly essential to making the economics of dense 5G networks work for operators. While sharing some neutral host infrastructure such as towers has become the norm, operators are starting to consider more extreme approaches to sharing, to make 5G deployment quicker and cheaper. These may include pooling resources in terms of sites, fiber and cloud systems, and increasingly the active RAN equipment (where regulators allow this). Two good examples are seen in China and Italy, and both sets of partners offered more details of their plans over the past week. After much negotiation and speculation, China’s second and third operators, China Telecom and China Unicom, have reached a…