In the third of a series of articles in advance of this year’s Broadband World Forum, Niall Hunt, the digital content lead for the event, explores how preparations for 5G are progressing and assesses the impact of 5G on converged operators.
Although it may feel like 5G has been around for years, the official approval of standalone specifications by international telecoms standards organisation 3GPP earlier this year means it’s really only just getting started.
This agreement means the industry is now in the final leg of the race to roll out 5G commercially, with device and network developers racing to transition to high-performance networks and launch 5G products which are not tied to legacy 4G technologies.
Compared to 4G LTE, 5G is expected to offer 100x faster speeds, 100x more devices, 10x lower latency and 1,000x higher data volumes. This will enable operators to provide new content services, enhanced mobile broadband and simultaneous 4K video streaming sessions, along with applications related to the likes of virtual reality and IoT.
However, it will also generate an enormous amount of traffic that needs to be stored, accessed and moved across the network.
For converged operators, a combination of technologies will be needed to minimise costs and maximise the opportunities available, all of which will primarily be centred around the customer experience.
Seamless connectivity
The big challenge for converged operators over the coming months and years will be understanding their existing customer experience strategy and planning for how 5G will fit into that.
Operators will have to get to a point where customers are able to connect to these next generation, all-IP networks via whichever means they choose. Seamless connectivity will be the cornerstone of the 5G user experience – regardless of location or the underlying network – so this has to dominate operators’ thinking when they are developing their fully converged all-IP cores.
Ultimately, consumers should be able to move across networks and not know whether they are connected via a mobile network or a fixed one. This means 5G will see fixed and mobile network convergence on a greater scale than ever before, with converged operators able to use their combined assets to a greater extent in order to provide an end-to-end service for customers.
The key comes in understanding that, although 5G is predominantly thought of as a mobile broadband phenomenon, fixed networks will still need to be integrated into the infrastructure to ensure customers receive a positive experience.
For example, in order to meet capacity requirements, areas targeted for 5G coverage will require lots of fibre to be successful. But that’s not all. Fibre will also be central to meet other 5G performance goals related to network diversity, availability, and coverage, all of which can be achieved through a greater number of interconnected fibre paths.
The irony is that the projected performance goals of 5G wireless will depend on the availability of optical fibre, which puts converged operators in a strong position. They can take full advantage of their assets by maximising take-up rates and utilisation of fibre access. At the same time, they can look to increase availability of fibre backhaul for network densification.
So, where should converged operators start? Well, there are two key areas within the wireline network that will need to be upgraded and modernised to support 5G.
Network transformation
The first area for converged operators to focus on is fronthaul, i.e. the part of the network connecting multiple Remote Radio Heads (RRH) to Centralised Baseband Units (BBU) where the baseband processing takes place.
BBU’s have traditionally been connected by copper cables, but are now being replaced by fibre which is lighter, more power-efficient, less expensive, more secure, and more resilient to the elements.
Fibre also supports far longer distances and much higher transmission rates, giving network operators the ability to centralise multiple BBUs into one location. Not only does this centralisation reduce the number of sites for operators to secure and manage, it also enables intelligent traffic coordination between multiple remote ratios.
The second key area concerns scalability. 5G promises to make a massive amount of bandwidth available to end users, all of which will need to be aggregated and placed on the wireline networks. For example, a 20MHz 5G MIMO antenna array can generate upwards of 64 Gbps of data – a massive increase in traffic.
As such, an increasing amount of pressure will be placed on both the fronthaul and backhaul networks – starting at the regional and long-haul networks and going all the way back to the data centres. To respond to these demands, fibre is again the answer.
Clearly, the rise of 5G is giving converged operators several things to think about. On the one hand, fixed-mobile convergence is set to completely redefine their customer experience strategies and will require operators to think in new ways.
On the other hand, the impact of 5G on scalability and fronthaul need to be considered, alongside investments in areas such as virtualisation, densification and network slicing. If they can get these things right, converged operators will be well set to capitalise on the 5G revolution in the years to come.
Discover more about what 5G means for converged operators at Broadband World Forum on the 23-25 October at the Messe, Berlin. It is the only event that brings together all the key players and building blocks of network technology.
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