The big infrastructure vendors all made significant announcements in advance of Mobile World Congress, holding their beauty parades before the distractions of the event itself. While there was a lot of the inevitable ‘5G’ vision-making on show, the main focus was on something more real – new platforms which could be deployed in a 1-2-year, not a five-year timeframe, and persuade even those carriers which are completing their LTE upgrades to invest in yet more kit, to get them closer to the all-IP, gigabit dream. Hence Huawei enlarged on its ‘4.5G’ theme, while Ericsson’s slogan was ‘Digital Telco’. But the biggest change of all is one that may progressively make the ‘G’ leaps irrelevant – the shift to virtualization and…