Points to Ponder in the New Year

Greetings friends!

This issue of Voice & Data has 5G infrastructure as the cover story.

As you may already know, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom are the frontrunners for 5G across China.

In South Korea, we have SK Telecom and Korea Telecom (KT). Vodafone Germany and Deutsche Telekom Germany are leading the way in Germany, There’s more! In the UK, EE, Vodafone UK, Three UK, and O2 UK, have launched commercial deployments. In the USA, there are AT&T and Verizon.

Now, that’s very good news for the telecom aficionados — group of people who are very knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Looking at some of the upcoming trends for 2020, operators need to have a portfolio combining backhauling technologies and fiber that will support the performance of 5G networks in the future. Next, there will be network slicing to enable the large enterprises have their own private networks.

There are many points other to ponder. How will 5G impact massive IoT projects? Do operators opt for low-band vs. mmWave, or both? What about critical communications and enhanced mobile broadband? 5G’s ultra-low latency has the strength to transform autonomous vehicles, smart logistics, and so on.

The road to 5G has a lot of infrastructure cost to tackle. There will be new spectrum, radio access network (RAN) infrastructure, etc. How will cloud RAN (C-RAN) function? Is it really going to be cheaper for operators in terms of capex and opex? By how much? Also, if the operators choose to delay the 5G investments, they would still need to increase the infrastructure spending to cope with their growing traffic. It is also likely that fiber will be a large part of several or all wired connectivity deployments across India soon.

These are just a few thoughts, dear friends. Here’s wishing all of you a Very Happy New Year 2020!