New open source technologies and conventional standards are still needed to push 5G deployments forward from the current ‘phony war’ of conventional architectures and 4G cores, to something genuinely disruptive. Some of these are high profile and radical, like new low latency and high density aspects of 3GPP Release 16, due early next year, or the emerging open specifications from the ORAN Alliance. Others, potentially like ONAP (Open Network Automation Protocol), risk being outdated before they are widely deployed – in the ever-receding horizon of true 5G, the definitions change all the time. ONAP seemed like something radical when AT&T donated the underlying code to the Linux Foundation – now it looks like a monster, an attempt to create a…