ISE Magazine, January 2019
JANUARY 2019 WWW ISEMAG COM 33 5G PREPAREDNESS Fiber to the home FTTH networks tick the box for the key requirements of efficient mobile transport economics scale and performance They deliver 50 transport cost savings perfectly matching the footprint of mobile cells and have the high performance needed for the 5G world Transport networks that interconnect mobile sites are referred to as mobile anyhaul By using broadband networks for anyhaul operators can gain the greatest benefit from converging fixed and mobile transport networks The enhanced bandwidth of next generation fiber technologies based on Passive Optical Network PON technologies and network slicing enabled by SDAN make converged residential broadband business broadband and mobile anyhaul even more attractive to operators The need for flexible backhaul fronthaul midhaul fronthaul has been apparent across previous generations of mobile technologies such as 3G and 4G and the technology continues to advance to support the 5G world Matching Footprints As mobile networks evolve to deliver higher speeds the number of small cells continues to increase Fixed networks are progressing alongside this to provide small cells with the backhaul connectivity that will scale in line with mobile network growth FTTx networks are by design ten times denser than the number of radio cells even in a 5G mmWave deployment and can offer a strategic long term solution for any bandwidth intensive service This density supports mobile operators in efficiently covering new cell sites and keeping up with the demands of their network as it expands If this is to be achieved mobile traffic must be prioritized meaning scheduling and shaping of traffic must become flexible to deliver enhanced Quality of Service QoS Advanced mechanisms also play a part in enabling this ensuring the protection availability and resilience of mission critical services One example of how a strategy such as this can facilitate mobile network upgrades was highlighted in a project we carried out with a North American Tier 1 converged operator that required a solution to increase capacity and coverage of its mobile network to cope with user requirements and competition The approach the operator took enabled it to reduce the time of deploying and provisioning mobile cells backhaul from several weeks to 1 day and reduce operational cost by factor 10 Its strategy was to connect small cells to the existing GPON network and configure each site as a VIP customer with very strict service levels agreement and prioritization of small cell traffic As fixed networks are generally built for Fixed and mobile access cloudification
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