At this year’s Mobile World Congress, the RAN industry was focused, as usual, on the next generation of performance and use case enhancements, but generally in a relatively hype-free and near-term way. There is an urgent need to deliver ‘true 5G’ in order to improve the services that operators can deliver, and therefore their revenue model in the near-to-medium term – and to unlock new revenue streams for the RAN and core suppliers and their ecosystems. 5G Standalone (SA) and the 5G core have not yet proved sufficiently compelling to tip most operators into moving on from their current Non-Standalone (NSA) networks, which use the 4G core. As noted in our leader, many vendors and operators are now hoping that…