Like Qualcomm, Nokia increasingly looks like a company which is hedging its bets on whether its traditional MNO customers will remain its only bread and butter in the 5G era. The more the mobile value chain shifts from connectivity to orchestration, services and applications, the more chance there is for other players, such as cloud providers or enterprise service specialists, to steal a place in that chain. Nokia has been explicit that some of its more recent launches – including its ‘petabit-class router’ and underlying processors – are targeted at webscale companies just as much as MNOs. And its cloud-based, virtualized packet core could clearly support network slicing – with Nokia providing the slice orchestration and intelligence, and the MNO,…