T-Mobile was temporarily overlooked during all the drama, but ended the week sharing strong metrics that highlight its 5G lead.

“Many of the benefits that Microsoft delivered in the enterprise space are directly applicable in the network space,” Microsoft VP Shawn Hakl said.

“When you deploy an air interface like 5G, it’s with you a very long time,” AT&T CEO John Stankey said.

The carrier is activating 5G service in one fell swoop across spectrum that was supposed to be cleared and available for use early last month.

The about face came shortly after the carriers dismissed the last-minute plea from aviation regulators and less than two days before the networks' planned launch.

AT&T and Verizon executives are in no mood to push the activation of mid-band 5G service back any further.

The aspiring greenfield operator moved the goalposts throughout 2021 and still ended the year without a single score.

“Once you start going out into the real world where a building, a tree, whatever is going to shadow that signal, then all bets are off," analyst Earl Lum

Never mind the elusive killer apps for 5G. What if 5G’s killer apps were staring right at us all along?

T-Mobile had a lot of wins in 2021, but it also suffered "the largest carrier breach on record," analyst Zeus Kerravala said.

Verizon previously said 5G network traffic would start hitting its 5G core in 2020 and pledged full commercialization of the 5G SA core in 2021.

The top seven vendors comprise about 80% of the total market, and ZTE and Samsung are both “trending upward,” according to Dell’Oro Group.

The carriers might be feeling especially justified in their cloud strategies in the wake of two recent Amazon Web Services outages.

The addition of Google Cloud puts Verizon closer to providing both public and private mobile edge compute services with all three of the cloud giants.

When the world’s largest public cloud fails, major organizations that rely on it are left in limbo.

CEO Tareq Amin initially pledged to publicly disclose and publish the costs of every application and piece of gear in a digital product catalog.

“It’s not fully baked,” IDC analyst Daryl Schoolar said. “I think they’re very open to taking it wherever it will go.”

The Federal Aviation Administration now says it “believes the expansion of 5G and aviation will safely co-exist.”

Does this first wave of open RAN for 5G necessitate a joint venture or an outright merger or acquisition involving Dish and Rakuten?

“I actually call this the internet of billions of things,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said during his keynote at AWS re:Invent.

"Some say we are the AWS of wireless,” Dish Network EVP Marc Rouanne boasted at the event.

“There's currently nothing like AWS Private 5G out there — a one-stop shop to manage a private cellular network that lets you start small and scale up as you

"There's no industry that hasn't been touched, and no business that can't be radically disrupted,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky boasted.

Enterprise IT isn’t a natural fit for the wireless industry, but it’s widely regarded the most potentially uplifting market by industry stalwarts and upstarts.