Is COVID-19 the compelling event for 5G networks?
For several years telecom operators have been scrambling to justify investment in 5G networks when much of their customer base can be easily served with 4G wireless and wireline broadband services. Many argue that low-latency corporate services and IoT are the applications that will provide that return on investment, but enterprises have been slow at their digital transformation, pushing 5G ROIs out a few years.
It is unquestionable by now that COVID-19 forced most of the population around the world to rethink our daily lives from work to school to entertainment. In response to travel bans and lockdown measures to limit the spread of virus, many people turned to digital tools to keep some level of normality. It’s been imperative to digitally transform our places of education and work to be able to operate effectively. It has circulated in many social media the joke about who has been more successful driving corporate digital transformation: the CEO, the CTO or COVID-19. Guess who has had more impact?
If anything, COVID-19 highlights the need for a forward-looking approach to digital transformation for most organizations. Organizations that have digitally transformed their infrastructure and customer experience have emerged as the most robust during even the darkest moments in this downturn. Even companies that were resistant to the concept of a distributed workforce have been forced to allow working from home.
One of the primary challenges of battling COVID-19 is delivering reliable connectivity to the millions of workers and students now attending classes from home. While the virus is affecting every single one of us, it can’t be denied that those of us living in big cities are better served with wireless and wireline connectivity than smaller rural cities. This means people are being disproportionally impacted depending on where the live.
On top of having to serve a more distributed usage, an increase of up to 50% more traffic with people consuming more services from home, telecom operators are also confronted with the challenge to provide network capacity to mission critical sectors like healthcare and public safety, which remain mobile and with increase importance to have access to low-latency, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity.
Some analysts say COVID-19 pushed forward the digital transformation of private, corporate and public sectors by up to 10 years, and this will be the benchmark moving forward. E-learning, E-Health, E-Work and many more remote ways of accessing or providing services are here to stay and will definitely require the next generation of wireless networks to support it.
It’s been true that every time a wireless technology, in capability and economics, crosses over that of a wired equivalent, wireless always becomes the preferred option. 5G will create that crossover point. With the speed, capability, latency, breadth of use cases and the economics of wireless, that a COVID-19 society requires, it will exceed that of its wireline counterpart, and that is why I believe this is the compelling event telecom operators have been looking forward to accelerate the rollout of 5G networks.
Now the next question is, are telecom operators ready to accelerate the rollout of 5G networks?
If we believe that most of their customers evolved up to 10 years in their adoption of digital services, just look at those families and friends connecting over videoconference with their elders that resisted technology for many years, or institutions like schools continuing to lecture remotely, then we should expect the telecom operators will also have to accelerate their digital transformation and accelerate automation for faster rollout of services and more responsive operation of their networks to cope with new usage behaviors and multitude of new services that need to be tested, deployed and optimized in much shorter cycles than they do today.
If we look at the current rollout of 5G networks, you realize that there are a significant number of options to choose from, depending on the starting point of the telecom operator. If you are a new entrant in the wireless market, you most probably will deploy a standalone network. Although a simpler architecture, it will go through a number of evolutions in the next few years as standards evolve. 3GPP release 15 already supports 5G but with limited features, what telecom operators really need is release 16 or even 17 to maximize the 5G capabilities, and the network equipment will require extensive testing before deploying into production. Then the micro-services architecture of 5G core components provides flexible deployments but also increases the number of network and service tests to be performed to ensure all components are working as expected. And this is the simple path.
Most of telecom operators however will follow the path of Non-Standalone Architectures (NSA), to leverage their existing 4G infrastructure. This means a more complex set of options and variations of network and service testing.
No way telecom operators are able to accelerate rollout of 5G networks and services without accelerating their digital transformation, automate planning, testing and network optimization and adopt more advanced tools. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning play a key role in the new toolkit operators will require to successfully accelerate rollout of 5G networks and introduce new services in what is now the new connected world of services.
It is time for telecom operators advance their digital transformation in order to meet post COVID-19 customer expectations!
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