Sprint has teamed up with Ericsson to develop a virtualised core network and operating system to support its IoT services. This is one of the most ambitious elements so far in the MNO’s strategy to move to a virtualized, white box network, to transform its costs and provide agile support for a wide variety of services. The core, which will launch along with 5G from 2019, is specifically optimized for IoT applications which require very low latency and/or critical availability, as well as high security. It ticks many of the hot boxes for the expansion of operators’ revenue streams via low latency 5G/IoT, such as edge compute, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. It remains to be seen how Sprint leverages…