Nokia laid claim to the world’s first fully cloud-based 5G vRAN, deployed with a US operator which is almost certainly Verizon in Dallas. Details were sparse, but the roll-out used a combination of central cloud-based functions and those based on distributed units at the cell site – an architecture which is increasingly looking more viable for 5G than the fully centralized vision of the original China Mobile concept of Cloud-RAN. But this is unlikely to have met the full definition of a 5G vRAN yet – those goalposts keep moving, but no vendor or operator has yet claimed to be able to deploy a pure cloud-native, containerized RAN, and that is likely to be the next goal.. Of all the…