5G Commercialization: Technology and Competitive Vendor Landscape Assessment

While pre-5G, pre-standards deployments have defined the 5G era thus far, significant hardening of standards related to both radio and core innovations has taken place recently. The new standard paves the way for deployment of true 5G radio equipment beginning later in 2018, across numerous spectrum bands, ranging from low-band frequencies to millimeter wave bands as high as 50 GHz. The 5G core may ultimately represent a more vexing challenge. The key to being able to adopt 5G-related features such as network slicing requires adoption of the Service-Based Architecture (SBA) for the 5G core. SBA represents a radical change in network design. The reference architecture for SBA is well-defined but the transition will be rocky. 

The exponential increase in network complexity created by 5G will introduce massive complexity into operator networks. Operators will require a software-defined, integrated, end-to-end approach to network and service orchestration that can separate data plane and control plane requirements and integrate multiple IP and optical transport domains in addition to OSS, business support and cloud infrastructure components. There remains much work to be done to make this vision a reality, however, and vendors are still in the early stages of figuring out best practices in terms of how to handle myriad management and orchestration requirements.

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?Tom Elliott

Head of Telco Suppliers

+44 (0) 207 936 6966