A significant opportunity was missed when the 5G standards process was kicked off – talks about integrating IEEE/WiFi contributions into the 3GPP process came to nothing, and the chance of a single, multi-RAT platform was lost once again. Of course, WiFi and cellular work increasingly closely together, even as different access technologies in the same virtualized network; and there are cooperations between the two technologies’ standards bodies on a regular basis. But a fully harmonized multi-access 5G would have ushered new economies of scale into the platform while encouraging a broad ecosystem of vendors, and potentially ending the battle between unlicensed cellular and WiFi for shared spectrum. So it remains unclear how close WiFi and 5G may come. WiFi’s roadmap…