Conquer these challenges for a successful 5G journey

With the promise of a better, more connected future, many enterprises are planning to hop onto the 5G bandwagon. According to Allied Market Research, the enterprise 5G market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.9% from $1.68 billion in 2020 to $16.84 billion by 2028.¹

While there is certainly such a thing as a first-mover advantage, moving into 5G too hastily can result in some regrets, especially if the expected benefits do not materialise. Before hopping on the 5G bandwagon, business must understand the following facts about 5G:

Arguably the most radical development with 5G is the shift to software. In the 5G approach, hardware functions are virtualised and delivered as software, with the Internet protocol providing the lingua franca for both the network infrastructure and the applications that run on it.

It is important for businesses to understand the implications of this transformation and how they can prepare themselves for it.

Virtualisation of the 5G network infrastructure allows it to be changed, managed, monitored, and optimised more effectively and efficiently, and enables capabilities such as network slicing, local traffic breakout, dynamic provisioning of bandwidth and differentiated quality of service (QoS) for different use cases.

However, in order to take full advantage of these capabilities, businesses will have to software-enable their infrastructure. For example, they could consider replacing their existing WAN hardware and software with 5G-capable routers and firewalls that include software-defined technologies.²

These software capabilities and new network intelligence will be critical to ensure every 5G use case performs as expected and can be delivered cost-effectively, with guaranteed end-to-end performance.

The success of a 5G deployment will thus hinge on businesses having a software strategy that will allow them to optimise the capabilities of the new technology.

5G networks can be built on different bands of spectrum ranging from low (below 2 GHz), to mid (2-6 Ghz) to high (above 6 GHz). Signal coverage will range from kilometres in the lower-band spectrum to a few metres in the higher-frequency millimetre wave spectrum.

When developing applications for 5G, it will be important for businesses to understand the spectrum characteristics required for each use case, and whether they can leverage the telco infrastructure or will need to create a bespoke 5G network.

For example, some of the most vaunted capabilities of 5G – ultra-high speed, ultra-reliable low latency and massive machine-type communications – will exhibit themselves most clearly in higher-frequency bands where signals will be able to carry more data. However, these signals do not travel very far and are prone to being blocked or absorbed by physical obstructions.

In the short term, this limits millimetre-wave 5G to use cases such as data-heavy applications requiring ultra-low latency or involving a massive number of connections in a limited physical space.

Ecosystem considerations will also come into play in deciding where use cases will sit in the 5G spectrum. Businesses have to make sure that there are sufficient network equipment providers, chipset manufacturers and device manufacturers that will support 5G projects operating in the particular band.

Consumer 5G services are delivered by service providers rolling out and managing networks at scale to support large numbers of users. Businesses, however, may need the network to address specific requirements in terms of communications needs, services, devices and service level agreements.

For example, quality of service will be vital to a manufacturing company looking to deploy 5G for mission-critical communications between production lines, robots, packing systems and other aspects of its operations.

As a software-driven network, 5G has the ability to address this through features such as network slicing and local breakout of traffic to the edge.

Unfortunately, a Gartner survey showed that out of all the communication service providers expected to complete their commercial 5G deployments by the end of 2022, half of them would not be able to monetise their investments as they would not have made the necessary investments in network slicing and edge computing technology to make 5G fit-for-enterprise.³

It is important therefore, for businesses to partner with service providers that have invested in these areas, in order to benefit from the new capabilities that 5G brings to the table.

With applications and services running in so many places - on public and private clouds and increasingly on the edge – businesses will need to develop a hybrid multi-cloud strategy to connect devices with data centres and the edge in order to fully capitalise on the potential of 5G.

5G makes it possible to transmit data at high speeds, in large volumes and with low latency to and from multiple clouds and edge locations, paving the way for AI and real-time analytics to deliver insights to real-time processes. It can power and amplify edge computing with its low latency, unmatched bandwidth and network slicing to deliver improved Quality of Service (QoS) for critical applications.

A multi-cloud platform will allow the business to connect all these different elements and drive agility and speed in the delivery of new features and services.

The deployment of 5G will be complex. It comes with an entourage of technologies that are at different levels of maturity – massive multiple input multiple output, 5G new radio, beam forming, millimetre wave, network slicing and many more.

There will be security concerns surrounding the deployment of a network based on distributed software-based systems, compared with earlier networks that relied on centralised hardware-based functions.

But there is no doubt that 5G will deliver on its promise of a better, more connected future. As pointed out in a Brookings report, “It is not the primary network that is transformative, but its secondary effects… If we’ve learned anything in the generational march through wireless connectivity, it is that we have always underestimated the innovation that would result from new generations of wireless networks.”⁴

Discover new possibilities with 5G. Speak to us to learn more.   

¹Allied Market Research, 5G Enterprise Market Expected to Reach $16.84 Billion by 2028, 2021.

²TechTarget, How 5G deployment will affect enterprise network hardware, software, 2019.

³Gartner, Gartner Survey Reveals Two-Thirds of Organizations Intend to Deploy 5G by 2020, 2018.

⁴Brookings Institution, 5G in five (not so) easy pieces, 2019.