Probate is a standard part of English Law

This is exactly correct.

As executor of a will you have to get probate, which means that a court has to confirm that
1. The will is valid
2. You are appointed as executor of the estate by the will
3. You are a fit and proper person to be appointed as an executor (eg no convictions for fraud, etc)

This is (in most cases) a rubber stamp - you send off the documents, and an official letter (the Grant of Probate) comes back from the court a few weeeks later.

Until you have this, you have no legal standing. Once you have this, you have the right to dispose of the estate as per the will. Any organisation will ask to see the Grant of Probate, and will refuse to deal with you until you have this.

This sounds very like the existing 3G soft handover feature.

I'm not involved in that area of telecoms these days, but I do recall that the network equipment manufacturers were finding it very difficult to get working, and requiring some serious compute power.