We noted in last week’s coverage of Mobile World Congress (MWC) that the network vendors continue to be downbeat about the near-term prospects for at-scale adoption of 5G Standalone (SA), which relies on the new cloud-based 5G core. In the last MWC before the pandemic lockdowns, the considerable question marks over the 5G core were mainly focused on technology, in particular whether the offerings billed as ‘cloud-native’ really were fully so, and whether they would deliver the promised benefits of disaggregation, service agility and automation. In 2023, the technology has largely been delivered, at least for the first generation, and 5G core platforms from the RAN vendors, and from IT specialists like Oracle and HPE, are proven to support cloud-native…