ISE Magazine, December 2019

DECEMBER 2019 WWW ISEMAG COM 25 MEC The Reality of the Rush to 5G It is hard to pinpoint exactly where the first 5G network was deployed Ooredoo was the first major telecom provider to make the claim in May 2018 pointing to a small deployment on the east side of Doha in Qatar South Korea made a similar claim earlier this year and several US telecom providers have argued they were first Why does it matter Simple according to IHS Markit 5G is expected to generate some 123 trillion in annual revenue by 2035 With that kind of market potential there is an understandable race to deploy 5G but the location of those deployments and how theyre built will depend on demand Much of the discussion around 5G has been focused on some of its more ambitious applications such as autonomous vehicles but the near term promises more incremental improvements over 4G services When consumers and enterprises alike start to demand better Quality of Service QoS to run existing and new applications operators will build the network to deliver that service level Vertiv recently commissioned a study of 5G progress and expectations with 451 Research and the results indicate the early jostling among providers is a preview of a rush toward widespread 5G deployment According to the survey 12 of telecom operators expect to roll out 5G services this year and a whopping 86 expect to be delivering 5G services by 2021 No one is easing into 5G See Figure 3 To make that timeline a reality telcos must prepare now to successfully deploy and fully leverage 5G technologies In some cases that means sharp detours from technologies and architectures that emerged to support previous generations of cellular networks The road from 3G to 4G to 5G is winding Network architectures that supported 4G in some cases run counter to what we are seeing from early 5G deployments C RAN architectures for example evolved to support 4G by taking equipment from the base of a cell tower and centralizing it elsewhere to serve multiple sites That made sense as a 4G strategy but 5G is all about reduced latency and proximity to the consumer That means more sites and more computing and IT infrastructure equipment at those sites What that looks like is an open question but its likely well see multi access edge computing MEC architectures that bring cloud capabilities into the radio access network That means physically deploying small self contained data center infrastructure systems within the operator network footprint anywhere between the core and the edge of the network In the survey 37 of respondents said they are deploying MEC infrastructure ahead of 5G deployments and another 47 intend to deploy MECs These sites will be critical to network performance and functionality and significant infrastructure investment and enhancements will be unavoidable As more sites are deployed there will be a corresponding increase in energy consumption and 94 of those surveyed expect 5G to increase their overall energy costs Telcos and equipment providers already are working across the network to mitigate those increases focusing on everything from intelligent load Figure 3 45G Deployment Timeline