Eyebrows have been raised by a recent deal between SK Telecom of South Korea and three major vendors over deployment of NFV (Network Functions Virtualization). As we reported last week, the operator has signed an agreement with Samsung, HPE and Intel to develop an NFV platform for its upcoming 5G NR Standalone (SA) deployment. In describing the deployment we expressed some surprise that SK Telecom was still talking about NFV at a time when other leading operators were looking beyond that towards truly cloud-native architectures based on microservices and containers. We were touching on a contentious issue for the industry over exactly how virtualization should operate within 5G networks and in particular support the flexibility and agility that will be…