We’re coming up on a year since most Americans started quarantining and social distancing to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the global workforce now incredibly dependent on new digital services and collaboration tools, this has had a major effect on the global internet infrastructure. To support or enforce remote working policies during the last ten months, many businesses have had to accelerate their plans for digital transformation.
But many online services; and platforms’ ability to meet the demands of this growing traffic was limited due to the capacity of the current network, and it became obvious that the data infrastructure wasn’t up to snuff. In fact, initially it strained the digital infrastructure to the point of breaking. In the starting months of quarantine, Netflix and YouTube had to enact resolution caps to limit their total bandwidth demands, while Zoom couldn’t handle the stress and completely crashed.
This quickly led to immense investments in the latest hardware and networking solutions, which are only expected to continue in 2021. Networking and telecom companies have also been heavily building out new infrastructure to support these increasing data demands - and 5G deployments has been a key part of this.
For many businesses, the inherent capabilities of 5G are perfectly suited for the network issues they wish to avoid and application capabilities they want to embrace.
Michael Clegg,
VP & GM, 5G,
Embedded/IoT,
Supermicro
#1: 5G Will Drive Immense Growth for Open RAN
GSMA Intelligence reported that almost 110 operators in almost 50 countries had launched new 5G networks by the end of 2020. This includes new Open RAN (ORAN) networks, whose deployments only started last year.
As we move into 2021, mobile operators will start to run full cloud-native networks to enable the full potential of 5G. ORAN and edge computing platforms’ availability are driving growth worldwide, while multiple suppliers are beginning to offer innovative solutions and continuing to reduce their costs as they are expanding services. The success of those deployments is leading more businesses to consider adopting open networks as opposed to the traditional proprietary models.
For instance, Rakuten in Japan started offering its customers in urban areas a major network upgrade, providing access to ORAN 5G network capabilities. And last April, DISH started deploying its greenfield wireless network, a 5G standalone (SA) network using ORAN architecture. Adoption and deployment of ORAN will only continue to accelerate in 2021, as digital transformation demands push cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Oracle to partner with mobile operators to rollout ORAN and bring edge technology to enterprises.
#2: Enterprise Applications Will Be the Focus for 5G Networks
Most operators have realized by now that just consumer adoption and proliferation of 5G will not lead to immediate revenue increases. The new 5G networks will simply not drive consumer interest or directly lead to a higher revenue per user. Revenue growth will instead be driven by the huge demand for new enterprise applications - which is the major focus for mobile operators and telecommunications businesses.
As part of the increasing adoption of digital transformation and trend to software-defined networking, businesses increasingly need private networks, higher speeds, new functionalities, network slicing, and other capabilities offered by 5G networks. Several applications will take advantage of and 5G’s low latency and high speed to offer new capabilities and video solutions for businesses. And enterprises are more than willing to pay to get access to these new applications and functionality.
As an example, many stadia plan to utilize 5G solutions to bring consumers back together to enjoy their favorite teams and other outdoor events once sports events start to become safe again. Nokia has taken the lead here by providing consumers with ultra HD live broadcasting and 5G VR/AR for an unparalleled spectator experience. These will be leveraged for new drone-filmed UHD video of stadia games and special VR filmed events to sell live tickets to remote viewers. Through private 5G network deployments, other industries -
Including manufacturing, hospitals and smart cities - will be able to create a high efficiency and performance network bubble.
#3: 5G Will Also Transform the Edge
Ultimately, 5G and edge proliferation are very closely intertwined. New enterprise 5G applications are empowering improved hardware solutions for both storage and compute. This is pushing data centers out to the edge; the most notable being new forms of micro data centers being developed on the market. Some are the size of a refrigerator and others are essentially a “data center on a pole,” making it easier for businesses to build and manage localized data centers in various cramped locations or harsher environments.
As data center solutions are designed for 5G and the edge, there is a need for increased performance, open-source software and new data standards to adapt to 5G applications. These span from virtual shopping experiences for retailers to connected wearables and internal health devices. Agile software-defined infrastructure capable of supporting simultaneous apps will be a requirement for many of these 5G use cases. With this type of infrastructure - dependable data centres, the cloud, virtualised RAN, and edge computing all working together - businesses can best deliver on the promises of oft-touted 5G applications.
