Rogers may have become Canada’s first operator to trial Cloud RAN, but is well behind many other leading operators, including peers in the USA. At least Rogers is now forging ahead, having earlier in 2024 completed testing of 5G network slicing, again with its main vendor Ericsson, along with a rollout plan for later in the year. The Cloud RAN trial was conducted at a recent Toronto Bluejays baseball game, and sought to establish the benefits in reliability, resiliency and efficiency, rather than just cost savings through use of commodity hardware. Rogers also extolled the virtues of cloud nativeness, which we discuss separately in the context of automation in this issue of Wireless Watch. “Cloud-native technology is a critical component…