While the leaders of the USA and China rant and rave at one another, western companies continue to work closely with those in China, aware that 5G will be a global platform, and will only achieve its full potential with input from as many organizations as possible. In the past, Chinese companies have been associated with proprietary technologies and closed ecosystems, but in the run-up to 5G, it has been China’s operators, especially China Mobile, which have been a driving force behind open, disaggregated and virtualized RANs. China Mobile’s vision of the Cloud-RAN, set out early this decade, was over-ambitious and too radical for most operators to emulate. But it laid down the gauntlet to the network hardware industry –…