Tue. Mar 19th, 2024

Will 5G Be As Big As Wi-Fi Was To The Enterprise — Or Bigger?

5G Wireless Wi-Fi

The new cellular spectrum made available by the FCC promises to radically transform enterprise networks by delivering extraordinary wireless performance and reliability that finally rivals wires.

Widely viewed as the most significant development in enterprise networking since the introduction of Wi-Fi, this year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorized the full use of a new wireless spectrum band for LTE and 5G cellular wireless technology — without expensive licensing fees and restrictions.

Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) is a 150 megahertz-wide swath of new wireless capacity within the 3.5 GHz band that effectively allows enterprises and service providers for the first time to deploy private mobile networks without having to acquire spectrum licenses.

And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Wireless technologies are getting more deeply embedded in enterprise processes and services. Meanwhile, edge computing is evolving to move processing closer to the physical location where things and people connect. This increases the need for ultrareliable wireless connectivity for mobile and IoT devices to deliver specific latency and bandwidth requirements that conventional wireless technologies were never designed to resolve.

In other words, the bottleneck now becomes the wireless link from the network edge to the device.

 

Wi-Fi Is Great, But Not Enough

Wi-Fi has long been the workhorse within companies to provide wireless connectivity and much-needed mobility. However, inherent challenges have made it difficult for organizations to run essential business applications over it.

Unlike cellular technology, Wi-Fi is a shared medium that suffers from chronic interference and unpredictable response times. To get on the network, devices must contend or fight to gain access. Cellular technology doesn’t have these problems because access and bandwidth are dedicated and prescheduled by the network. The market ramifications of this technical reality are profound for enterprises everywhere.

A recent Capgemini survey of more than 500 companies around the world found that over 75% of respondents believe 5G will fully unlock their digital transformation initiatives over the next five years, and they are willing to pay a premium to get it. That means a massive market.

In 2020, Polaris Market Research valued the global 5G enterprise market at $1.3 billion and estimated that it will balloon at a 57.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next seven years.

At the heart of this explosive growth is the need for more predictable wireless performance, improved security and broader coverage that private cellular networks deliver in spades.

However, the only way for companies to currently leverage cellular wireless technology is to contract with a mobile operator that owns the infrastructure and controls the data. If something goes wrong, getting it rectified is arduous, time-consuming, costly and riddled with complexity.

Unfortunately, there are no seamless, simple or cost-effective solutions for enterprises wanting to exploit this newly available CBRS spectrum or bridge the growing divide between their existing IT infrastructure and cellular wireless.

This is all about to change.

 

Build Your Own Mobile Network

Recent technical innovations are bringing to market a new class of network platforms that make deploying and operating your own cellular infrastructure as simple as — or even simpler than — Wi-Fi.

The difference is that you own and control infrastructure and the data running over it.

Central to this proposition is the ability for these systems to ensure between LTE and 5G wireless and the existing IT infrastructure already in place. This means automatically mapping, enforcing and tracking essential service parameters such as latency, jitter, delay and even packet loss across the entire network on a per-application and device basis.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, 5G is more than merely a new wireless protocol. It is an entirely new cloud-native, software-driven architecture for all network services — including the radio access network (RAN), the core network services and the operational model.

Given this software-driven approach and 5G’s inherent closed-loop control over devices, artificial intelligence can be used to truly automate network operations and more easily control critical service policy in software with little or no human intervention.

This uniquely enables the realization of the ever-elusive self-driving network.

To best leverage the private cellular networks technology, enterprises should identify critical applications in their business that require strict service level or quality of service controls.

Companies should also strictly define which service level metrics are important for each application. This should help them prioritize budgets and better integrate new enterprise-class 5G technology with what they are already using.

Another key strategy is to get IT staff involved early in the evaluation process. Cellular technology has the rightful mystique of being complex and difficult to deploy. That’s true with traditional products built for operators.

The good news is that recent technical advances mask much of this complexity and embrace tried-and-true deployment models with which IT is familiar. To accelerate adoption for these critical business use cases, it is imperative that enterprises leverage these advancements and avoid complex technology that requires completely new operational models.

Notable use cases include critical voice and video communications in hospitals, autonomous guided vehicles in warehouse and distribution centers, robotics on the manufacturing floor, point of sales kiosks in retail environments and remote video surveillance for smart campuses and cities. These types of applications, and many others like them, now require new levels of predictable and reliable wireless that are no longer negotiable.

As 5G technology finds its way into the enterprise, the creation of private cellular networks, now owned and operated by the enterprise itself, is ushering in a profound new era of networking that rivals anything we’ve ever seen. While consumers will certainly benefit from 5G, the enterprise market is most likely to provide the greatest return.

 

Source:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/11/03/will-5g-be-as-big-as-wi-fi-was-to-the-enterprise—or-bigger/?sh=43ab672c1130