One of the disappointing aspects of the first wave of 5G deployments is that most operators are not rolling out a full ‘5G platform’, but are building conventional physical RANs (see next item), while moving towards virtualized cores and digital infrastructure in a parallel, not an integrated, strategy. This is disappointing because many of the benefits touted for 5G are not delivered by the 3GPP standards alone, but by IT technologies which were expected to accompany them – virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), cloud-native platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). When these are combined with 5G networks – which were conceived to work with a software-driven approach – they should deliver the gains that are often claimed for 5G alone, including cost…