Huawei, Nokia, and Cisco all saw their respective market share drop, while Ericsson was flat and ZTE managed to gain share.

Rakuten Mobile isn’t going far, less than 10 miles in fact, for the procurement of its 5G core.

Early adopting service providers include AT&T, Bestel, Bloomberg, Colt Technology Services, HGC Communications, Infonas, PCCW Global, and Sparkle.

The vendor is now being monitored for a three-year period, following last year’s $1.06 billion settlement with the Justice Department.

The deal in Canada follows a flurry of activity for Equinix aimed at bolstering its hyperscale strategy and expanding capabilities in edge computing.

“The growth of the open networking ecosystem will be essential to meeting enterprise coverage and services needs in the 5G era," GSMA CTO Alex Sinclair said.

“This is a big step in removing the delineation between private and public networks," analyst Zeus Kerravala said.

There is ongoing debate among the big RAN vendors around the use of commoditized hardware and interfaces to program the RAN.

“It’s not a secret that we did not do as well as we wanted to in the first phase of the web build outs," Cisco's Jonathan Davidson said.

Nokia continues to stand out in supporting open RAN efforts by joining more collaborative bodies than its closest competitors Ericsson and Huawei.

“Competition in the near term will be a marketing war of coverage and speed," said William Ho, founder and principal analyst at 556 Ventures.

The features target operators seeking to deploy 5G while integrating infrastructure across data centers, the edge, and the transport network.

Analysys Mason is “optimistic that 5G capex will bounce back in 2021, but the scale will be dependent on new business demand.”

Huawei’s ongoing investment in cloud computing will foster new tools for 2 million developers around the world, according to the company.

SoftBank recently gained a stake in T-Mobile US following its acquisition of Sprint, and is negotiating to sell a part of that stake to Deutsche Telekom.

Irrespective of its many challenges, survival does not inspire confidence, and companies are generally reticent to use it as a baseline for performance.

"In general, we are not seeing any side effects of the epidemic" and no impact on 5G construction, Rakuten Mobile's Tareq Amin told SDxCentral last month.

“I think it’s up to us as leaders and as teams to not accept the world the way it’s been, but to actually change the world," AWS CEO Andy

“We’re optimistic about the future and the ways in which technology that you will create will help to make it a better world," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said.

Verizon's 5G mobile service is commercially available in 30 U.S. cities today and it plans to reach 60 cities before the end of the year.

“We are ramping in this environment, not actually slowing down in any manner," T-Mobile's Neville Ray said.

AT&T is “still cautious about the visibility and limited in the visibility going forward” as it relates to COVID-19, CFO John Stephens said.

The Swedish vendor raised its prediction for 5G subscriptions from 2.6 billion to 2.8 billion by 2025, adding that some gains will also occur before the end of 2020.

"We might be slowed down on the number of base stations that we are able to construct, but I don’t think it’s going to be materialistic," Rakuten Mobile's Tareq