5G continues to be the buzz in telecom circles - opening a whirlwind of new possibilities across industries and creating an environment conducive to entirely new use cases and experiences, brought about by high-speed connectivity and reduced latency. Despite the pandemic and knock-on global recession, 5G remains on track to become the quickest generation of wireless cellular technology to be widely adopted. And Asia Pacific, in particular, holds the greatest potential for 5G, with technology analyst GlobalData predicting that Asia Pacific will account for almost 65 percent of global 5G subscriptions by 2024.
The region is definitely seeing a rapid transition from the 4G-enabled app economy into the era of truly open innovation, with 5G capable of delivering an enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) experience in which users can experience a minimum of 50-100 Mbps everywhere and see peak speeds greater than 10 Gbps with a service latency of less than 1ms. But more than merely having a speed faster than that of 4G, 5G provides the foundation for transformative applications, including augmented and virtual reality, supercharged Internet of Things (IoT), cloud gaming, user-generated content applications, and 8K streaming.
Indeed, 5G promises a new wave of video-centric, 5G-specific consumer services with high revenues and high-margin use cases, translating to more immersive and interactive experiences. With 5G, for instance, consumers across the Asia Pacific region have the opportunity to stream live sport and provide multiple streams - giving them the capability to have a 360-degree view of a stadium and even have co-viewing mode with friends.
Components behind a great 5G user experience
Delivering a great 5G user experience, however, requires more than a go-with-the-flow approach. Only virtualised technologies will be able to harness the true power of 5G to meet the insatiable demand for streaming more digital content to more users, faster. And this would entail necessary investments in edge computing, which facilitates a 5G era scale for wireless content delivery. Multi-access edge computing (MEC), in which there is a flexible provisioning of network slices, drives the delivery of service value at the edges of the network.
The current traditional content delivery network (CDN) model will still be relevant for the next few years across the region, but innovating new services at the required bandwidth level will necessitate lower latency - which means the content has to be moved closer to the user, and has to be put inside a 5G network. And this is why in order to deliver sustainable, true 5G user experiences, physical or virtual base stations will need super high-performance caching and edge computing capabilities to ensure that as much traffic as possible is managed at the edge of the network.
We are moving towards a sustainable model, where 5G CDN telcos will have a virtualised platform consisting of an edge data centre connected to the antennas directly. In the case of some applications, getting as close to the antennas themselves will be the key to success. Ultimately, being able to effectively manage traffic such as in-stadia and city centres, as well as demand spikes from sports finals, viral moments or global crises, will be key in sustaining 5G edge - and this is where having a highly elastic, cloud-native technology that can handle traffic density will be essential.
Banking on a new breed of CDN
According to IEEE, the end of the decade will see the creation of more than 50 trillion bytes of information per person, per year, as the region enters the era of the Yottabyte. However, before reaching this point, the region will realise that the limitations of the legacy CDN model will become even more pronounced, as everyday life becomes more dependent on wireless connectivity. As such, trying to achieve 5G era performance with traditional CDN will be exorbitant and could significantly slow down the internet, with 5G applications stuck returning to the core network and centralised cloud compute and storage.
Having a fully optimised 5G thus requires a new CDN frontier that is closer to consumers than has ever been possible before. Speed, the capability to deliver more capacity per unit, and low latency are now must-haves in CDNs. Employing a new approach to the CDN - where it is re-architected, virtualised, and localised, is key to having an optimal 5G solution. After all, the CDN solutions that might have served consumers in 4G effectively and fixed broadband, are now deemed to be “legacy” technology on 5G.
Moving forward,the virtualisation of the CDN makes localisation possible, but next-generation architectures demand more than merely pushing the resource closer to the edge. For the economics to work for a telco sustainably, the resource has to be applied dynamically - never too much, never too little and always in preparation for whatever is coming in even the remotest corner of the 5G network.
