Being a pioneer in technology does not always translate into commercial disruption. After all the attention paid to Rakuten’s genuinely innovative deployment of a virtualized, multivendor network – which will progress to an end-to-end, cloud-native 5G one quite quickly – the commercial 5G launch has been less inspiring. “Quarterly losses from Rakuten’s mobile network are proving much higher than we anticipated,” wrote New Street Research in an August client note (before the 5G launch earlier this month). It made the point that, while virtualized networks – at least when they are built greenfield, with no legacy technology to migrate or support – can be cost-effective to run, a new entrant in a competitive market will always face very high marketing…