Vietnam’s largest operator, Viettel, says it has developed its own 5G equipment in the RAN and core, bucking the trend for MNOs to deploy networks pretty much off-the-shelf from the large vendors. In the 3G era, large operators often developed their own network technologies, in order to steal a march on rivals. Verizon had a huge influence on CDMA by adopting it at an early stage and feeding amendments into the Qualcomm platform; but remains one of the very few MNOs that did the same at the 5G stage, with its pre-standard 5G Technology Forum specifications. But it now faces the cost and effort of migrating that to align with full 3GPP standards, a challenge that had a significant effect…