Europe, being one of the most developed and affluent regions in the world, will play a key role in the widespread 5G rollout. Europe is at the forefront of smart cities, campus lab testing, sustainability, and telecommunications innovation, not to mention the consumers, manufacturers, and various industrial enterprises that seek an improved mobile experience and/or must run automated systems on a private network. Each of these applications, among many others, will use 5G coverage as the backbone for myriad use cases.
Sidelink is a Device-to-Device (D2D) communication technology that broadens Long Term Evolution (LTE)/5G network coverage. This technology has been around since The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Release 12 when it was used to enable basic vehicular communication (Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)) on LTE networks. Over the years, there have been incremental upgrades, such as Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) sidelink support in 3GPP Release 14 and 5G support in Release 15, among others. Then, 3GPP Release 16 introduced 5G New Radio (NR) support, which is highly beneficial for 5G users looking for deployment flexibility on-premises. Now we arrive at 3GPP Release 17 and Release 18 (5G Advanced), both of which are bound to challenge the way you think of sidelink.
Like virtually every other industry, the telecommunications (telecom) industry has been affected by current macroeconomic and geopolitical trends (war in Europe, high inflation, global warming, etc.), causing doubt about the future of their enterprise. In some areas, the influence of these key telecom trends may not be as severe as you’d think, but in other areas, there are some radical departures taking place. To help operators and ecosystem players understand the effects of ongoing global challenges, and how to plan for the future, ABI Research has compiled some of the most important developments surrounding the telecoms sector.
DISH’s 5G Network Deployment Plans
DISH Wireless has been in the forefront of the news for years now, being one of the few greenfield 5G network operators entering saturated markets and, at the same time, radically reshaping how mobile networks are being designed, dimensioned, and deployed. Indeed, DISH Wireless has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host a large part of its network and the hyperscaler has written extensive articles highlighting how the networking stack has been designed from the ground up to combine both AWS infrastructure and servers deployed in the new network. Moreover, DISH Wireless is a strong supporter of Open RAN and aims to use open interfaces, disaggregated hardware, cloud-native, and software throughout its network.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic putting a strain on capital expenditure (CAPEX) in many industries, 5G investments were largely spared, as countries like China and South Korea go all-in with 5G rollouts. In ABI Research’s latest 5G market forecast for the years 2022 to 2027, it’s clear that adoption is destined for rapid growth and will shift from a minuscule slice of the network market to the largest network by 2026. Moreover, market data from some other reports, such as a 5G Advanced whitepaper and the IoT Tracker: 5G report—add more credence to the notion that 5G is rapidly overtaking 4G/LTE. In this post, we take a closer look at the 5G market forecast with eight eye-opening stats that every service provider needs to know to plan for success.
There’s nothing more fascinating than uncovering the development of certain technologies and how these came to be in today’s form. Cellular standards are no stranger to politics, lobbying, intense competition, patent disputes, and many other commercial rivalries. The choice of technologies in The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is one of these contested domains, where companies compete to promote their own technology choices, giving them a significant competitive advantage when they have a strong patent portfolio in the area. Channel coding is one of those areas, where interesting developments took place with 5G.
Investors and shareholders are increasingly losing their patience with telcos, which have promised that their enterprise revenue will soon overtake their consumer business. At the same time, enterprise end users are not yet convinced that today’s 5G can address their pressing key pain points in line with the IMT-2020 vision most 5G suppliers are preaching.
The first article in this series discussed why telco operators need to reinvent themselves. In short, there are significant opportunities in both consumer and enterprise domains, but operators need to transform their platforms to address these new opportunities in an increasingly competitive environment. Despite the entry of hyperscalers in the telco domain, telco operators have the experience, physical assets, and technology expertise that no other entity has in the market. For example, current 5G cell sites are set up to transfer more than 200 Terabytes (TB) per day, a monumental feat considering any network, let alone wireless. In the fixed broadband space, connections transfer TB worth of data every day for consumers, especially if we consider 4K content and immersive applications. These require significant expertise that only telco operators possess.