  We show that most features of the mass and mixing pattern of the second and
third SM fermion families can be accounted for without making use of flavour
symmetries or other types of flavour dynamics. We discuss the implications for
flavour phenomenology, in particular for the $\tau\to\mu\gamma$ decay rate, and
comment on LFV effects at colliders. We show that the model can be embedded in
a full SO(10) supersymmetric GUT in 5 dimensions that preserves the successful
MSSM gauge coupling unification prediction for $\alpha_s$. Interesting features
of this embedding are i) the connection of one of the hierarchy parameters with
the strong coupling assumption, ii) the absence of KK threshold effects on the
$\alpha_s$ prediction at one loop, and iii) the shift of the GUT scale up to
about $10^{17}\GeV$. Proton decay is under control, also due to the larger GUT
scale. A large atmospheric angle for normal hierarchical neutrinos is obtained
in an unusual way.
