Despite the US operators’ big claims about “world-leading” 5G build-outs and investments, in fact they are being relatively circumspect about their capex spending (except when it comes to the C-band spectrum auction, of course). Compared to China’s massive expenditure on rolling out a gigantic network very quickly, the USA’s spending looks cautious, and is not set to jump significantly until 2022 onwards, though there is an uptick in 2021 compared to 2020. Even from 2022, the operators are hoping to keep capex growth under control, even as they deploy 5G Standalone at scale, by leveraging the efficiencies of more open, cloud-based networks and by working with third parties, such as public cloud providers and tower operators, to spread or reduce…