It has come full circle for the big mobile vendors. They used to control every aspect of the design of their platforms, from antennas to processors to devices, but increasingly they looked to reduce cost by focusing on a few key elements and delegating the rest to partners. In the age of virtualized networks, it seemed that trend would intensify, as the game became all about software on commodity boxes. Except that it didn’t. In the access and backhaul networks, the remaining physical components, such as antennas, have to perform at unprecedented levels to meet the demands of the massive data loads the virtualized architectures promise to support. There is differentiation, once again, to make in the chips and the…