The road to fully cloud-native mobile cores, let alone RANs, is a slow and painful one for most operators. It involves significant changes in culture, skills, processes and technology. It entails leaping into a relatively immature and unproven platform after years of intimately understanding how a physical, integrated core or RAN operated. And it will bring a new set of suppliers and partners, including the webscale giants themselves. The cloud-based 5G network is an obvious opportunity for Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba to add telcos to their growing lists of critical systems hosted for enterprise customers. Yet it is a double-edged sword for operators. On the one hand, it could reduce their costs, and also help achieve…