The Conversation
Industry insights
The evolution to 5G is being contemplated around the world. Operators have different deployment strategies—or may still be working on them—but the eventual move to 5G is obligatory, and beneficial for both users and operators. Operators will need to support a diversity of revenue streams. Those will vary between MNOs and may change over time. The key, therefore, is to develop a 5G platform with sufficient capacity and flexibility to enable any use case which makes commercial sense, now or in the future. Fiber throughout the network, and flexible resource management across fiber and radio, will be essential to this network versatility.
Ciena insights
5G mobile networks will significantly affect both the wireless and wireline side of the global network infrastructure, as airborne wireless bits jump to and from wireline networks. The expected performance increases of 5G over existing 4G networks include:
- 10x to 100x higher user data rates
- 10x to 100x more connected devices (humans and machines)
- 10x reduction in latency
- 1000x more data volumes
It's not economically feasible to scale existing wireline networks by a factor of 10x to 100x from cost, complexity, space, and energy consumption perspectives to support the expected 5G performance gains over 4G. This means adopting automation and agility to more intelligently and flexibly allocate network resources when and where required.
Since 5G is not intended to outright replace 4G, meaning the two will coexist well into the future, the demands of both must be satisfied—all over a common, cost-effective wireline infrastructure, wherever possible. Specific wireline technologies applicable to 5G include:
Ciena is intensely focused on innovation across coherent optical, edge packet platforms, automation, and multi-domain service orchestration technologies, products, and services. The combination of these components provides a highly differentiated, best-in-breed, and open solution giving MNOs ultimate choice in scaling their existing 4G networks and their future 5G networks.