In virtualization, there are also issues of equipment and location, notably the investment required in data centers (inhouse or hosted cloud services) or ‘base station hotels’ built around switching centers. And both of these important trends could see new vendors moving to the top of the MNO supply chain. Small cell HetNets are giving new prominence to specialist suppliers like Airspan and ip.access, on the base station side, or Airhop in self-optimizing networks, among many others. Virtualization on this small cell layer – which for many MNOs will come long before any attempt to convert the main macro network to Cloud-RAN – is already fostering interesting new names, including Quortus and Parallel Wireless, and reviving older ones, like Airvana. But…