July 17, 2017 | 28:13
Episode 1: The Road to 5G is Paved with Good Fiber
Nothing demonstrates our dependence on mobile connectivity quite like the long summer vacation from school. How else are parents going to entertain angsty kids on the long trip to grandma's house? U.S. consumers and business users are spending many hours on our mobile phones each day, with that number poised to grow even more. 5G promises step increases in performance that will unleash new applications and services that today's best effort 4G/LTE networks cannot support, but much change needs to happen first. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) need to carefully consider their 5G wireline infrastructure strategies in order to fully capitalize on the commercial opportunity. Today, we're talking to our own Brian Lavallee about the transformative promise of 5G, the state of 5G globally, and the technology strategies MNOs are taking to get to 5G.
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by Simon Zhao
5G is a great market opportunity for everyone
by Baris Demir
Thank you Brian (also good to hear your voice again) and Bo for this interesting overview of and your insights regarding the coming road to enabling 5G wireless communications... with the expected explosion of the Internet of things (in addition to people) being interconnected and connected to AI-in-the-Cloud apps, the advent of 5G as the glue that binds them all together indeed promises to open up a myriad of opportunities for making our world a better place to live, to thrive and to play in. Of course, as highlighted in your podcast, as long as the business case or the case for societal good justifies the required investments. It would be very interesting (and maybe a little entertaining) to listen to your podcast again in 5+ years to see how the future actually plays out and contrast that with Brian's predictions... as Niels Bohr (and perhaps others as well) evidently said, "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.".
by Lawrence Stark
Hi Brian, Excellent blog - it's a pleasure to listen to. You made some very useful points on the benefits of 5G that aren't always presented on this topic such as power consumption, latency and network availability. If I could ask for clarification on network slicing, it sounds like a pure software driven feature, but could somebody tell me if there is a hardware element as well? Is this a benefit of the flex wavelength and bandwidth assignments?
by Brian Lavallee
@Baris - I’m also curious to see how accurate my crystal ball will be, but as history has consistently shown, whenever we improve end-to-end network performance, we find ways to use it, and then want more… 5G should be no different.
by Brian Lavallee
@Simon - Agreed, 5G is a great business opportunity for software/hardware vendors, mobile network operators, OTT players, app developers, data center operators, and end-users alike, both man and machine. There’s a lot of excitement around the increases in capacity to users, and rightfully so, but it’s the significantly reduced latency and eventual guaranteed end-to-end performance of 5G that will open up a whole new world of applications and use cases.
by Brian Lavallee
@Lawrence - Thanks for the kind feedback. I believe 5G’s significant latency reduction is a gamechanger to enable a new wave of possible use cases, and revenue opportunities. Network Slicing can be implemented via hardware (network, storage, compute), such as building a separate physical network for a given use case (ex. emergency responders communications). Network Slicing can be implemented via software over common hardware using a logical use case service separation (ex. VPNs). Or, it can be a combination of the two.