In the wake of Mobile World Congress, Norwegian operator Telenor released a white paper, written with Metaswitch, claiming that containers are the only viable way to build large-scale 5G networks. The paper describes a proof-of-concept and a live trial based on delivering VoLTE at an event in a remote area of Norway. It does highlight challenges to the adoption of container technology in telco networks – primarily, immaturity of available systems, security concerns and orchestration complexity. However, these are outweighed by the advantages compared to the more established approach of virtual machines (VMs) in software-defined networks – speed of deployment, support for increased density of network elements and devices, and more efficient scaling. These benefits should accelerate industry efforts to…