NTT Docomo and SK Telecom won the early plaudits for developing multivendor virutalized cores, back in the 4G days, but Telenor has leapt ahead in creating a multivendor 5G Standalone platform. Its R&D team won an award at the recent Mobile World Congress for ‘Best Network Software Breakthrough’, using offerings from RedHat, Casa, Kaloom, Oracle, Huawei, Enea and others, as well as open source components, on a cloud-native platform. “Doing a 5G core without going cloud-native should be considered a crime,” commented Pål Grønsund, senior research scientist at Telenor. The team claims their tests and trials have proved that it is feasible to deploy a service-based architecture in a multivendor environment to support use cases such as network slicing and…