Four changes you need to consider going to 5G

5G is the new collection of technologies that promises to revolutionize the communications arena, as the previous 4 other Gs. In this case the changes are going to be more profound in several ways, altering the way the companies work, and impacting not only the telecommunication business, but the inner workings of the operations at various levels.

Change your riggers for interior designers

5G superior capacity and low latency is based in several technologies, as well as the deployment of high density of small cells. Those, as you may expect, will be mostly utilized in dense urban areas were the distance between sites will be of just some tens of meters, due in part to the high frequencies used (in the range of the mmWaves) and the requirement of providing service to numerous devices simultaneously in dense areas. Well, if you talk to your implementation team they will tell you about the horror stories of implementing sites inside buildings; from Venetian marble in the facades to fancy designs on wall interiors, your teams have to face some of the most horrific situations possible trying to come up with solutions to install antennas on some of the more iconic places in your cities; imagine that issue multiplied by hundreds. There, you will still need to have teams trained to climb safely and install your antennas in high places, but in this battlefield, most of your deployment problems will come from the most profitable areas, the big buildings, were the ability to climb is not as important as the capability to hide your antennas is.

While your engineers are working on getting you the best massive beamforming antennas, something that you should start considering is the color of those or how to get covers that allow you to mimic the environment were those are going to be deployed. Who wants a white square on top of the dark blue decorative plaster the owner just applied to the walls of the building?

From selling phones and data plans to IoT

One of the main reasons to develop 5G is to provide the conditions for a massive IoT deployment. With billions of devices on the streets in the coming years (50 Billion according to several projections) the business case for 5G is supported in a big portion for the massive utilization of cheap devices connected to everything around you. From the fridge to cars, all appliances and many company devices, will be connected to the network in order to provide information and being controlled, 24x7. The big question is how your company can prepare to profit from this situation.

Until now, most of the plans developed by wireless companies belong to a phone (prepaid or postpaid) or a data plan for tablets and portable Wi-Fi devices, those plans will prove ineffective in fulfilling the requirements of the new environment. Now, giving the new opportunities, your company will be required to come up with innovative approaches to build the new product plans for your company: Will you be selling data packages (at very low price) for customers to connect their washing machines? Will you be partnering with IoT vendors to provide full packages? Or will you be working with local companies for them to be agents to make the installations and configurations required? In any case, the question posed becomes whether or not your commercial is team ready for the challenge and how your company is planning to operate under the new conditions.

Your Towerco will no longer be your main source of sites

As explained before, the use of spectrum at high carrier frequencies bring several issues, due to the fact that the free-space propagation loss and the wall penetration losses are higher. These commands you to find a lot more sites, primarily indoor. As of today your main source of sites to install your nodes have been the tower companies, with some exceptions in very special cases where your customers demand for better coverage inside their premises This is all beginning to change now, and the ability to negotiate with building owners and local authorities to get enough sites to provide the quality you are promising to your customers is becoming a key factor to your business. Imagine to have autonomous driving cars with holes in your coverage? That, among many other quality critical services, are requirements that you can only fulfill if you have all the sites required and the internal (or external) resources to acquire sites smoothly in diverse environments, so you need to create a strong site acquisition team able to negotiate massively the contracts required with the owners of all those places.

The shape of your technical operation teams will change dramatically

You may have heard the term SON (Self-Organizing Networks), it conceptualize the ability of your network to operate autonomously at various levels, improving quality and reducing costs at the same time. So far, SON has not delivered on the expectation the operators had since its inception; up to now it has only focused in the RAN part, especially in the field of parametrization for node deployment. That will not be the case with 5G, were you won’t be able to operate without a high level of automatization. As a result of the growth in the number of element and the complexity of the technical environment (antenna’s beam direction changing several times per millisecond to serve individual users, for example) one cannot rely in operation teams to run analysis in a daily basis and make changes on the network at a useful pace. Now the network has to be able to organize and optimize by itself, so you need to adjust your technical teams to that reality and hence your structure has to evolve. Many of the tasks currently being manually implemented will be automated and the focus of your personnel will be in many cases totally different, so you better start thinking in a path towards your new organization.

Pending on several factors (such as spectrum availability, market maturity, country development and more) 5G will still take some years to deploy in many countries, but the reality is that the requirements of the market and the evolution of the technology will impact even LTE operators who will gradually start to feel the need to evolve, in order to maintain the profitability by capturing new market segments and reduce their operational costs. You cannot allow the future to catch you off guard.