Many people continue to work from home — not because their office is still closed, but because they want to. In the U.S., 61% of people are working remotely by choice, according to a February 2022 Pew Research survey. Those employees need a fast, reliable connection, which is why one major trend in 2022 will be an increase in companies jockeying to serve the residential broadband market with enterprise-grade solutions.
At the end of 2021, nearly 200 operators in over 70 countries had launched 5G networks, GSMA Intelligence says. With feature sets such as Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) and Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), those 5G networks can support bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive business applications such as HD video collaboration. In fact, mobile operators could partner with video collaboration service providers — as a recent American Tier 1 operator did — to offer enterprises a turnkey bundle of software, connectivity and hardware for remote workers.
This could be attractive to businesses because their videos, files and other communications are no longer at the mercy of their employees’ personal networks. Their data isn’t competing with their kids’ online gaming for bandwidth or is vulnerable to hackers that have used other household devices as back doors into the home network’s traffic.
Space is the place
Mobile operators aren’t the only ones that will target the burgeoning home/remote office market this year. So will “new space” providers such as Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite operators — another emerging trend. Like their cellular counterparts, satellite providers will have to overcome the perception that their technology is too slow, too expensive and too laggy to support residential lifestyles and workstyles.
This will drive a third trend: In 2022, expect a surge of R&D, standards work and other initiatives to make satellite technology better able to serve a wider variety of business and consumer markets, including bridging the digital divide. One example is “5G and Non-Terrestrial Networks,” a new 5G Americas white paper explores why and how the two technologies can work together.
The private 5G market heats up
Expect private 5G network deployments to soar in 2022. Mobile operators need to monetize their brand-new networks, and virtual slices for private 5G is a major opportunity to do so. Meanwhile, hyperscalers are lining up alongside vendors to provide turnkey solutions for enterprises that want to own a network rather than use a dedicated slice of a public network.
Another driver is availability of spectrum for enterprises. This spectrum supports enterprise applications that are important for business operations but are less demanding in terms of performance.
The market demand is there. For example, in the manufacturing sector alone, 76 of companies plan to deploy private 5G by 2024, according to an Analysys Mason survey. That massive rollout will ramp up this year.
The Terahertz frontier
As consumer and enterprise data traffic grows, it’s also increasingly shifting from copper and fiber networks to wireless ones. The aforementioned remote worker trend is one example why.
All of this puts even more pressure on researchers and regulators to identify new spectrum to meet this insatiable demand. In 2022, a majority of operators will move to standalone (SA) 5G networks, ushering in the millimeter wave (mmWave) era. Preliminary work on 6G is now underway in every major country, and it includes exploring expanding into terahertz (THz) spectrum. Besides providing support for even more traffic, THz spectrum also can deliver higher speeds, granular positioning and other capabilities that are difficult or impossible with 5G and existing bands.
It is a RAN’s world
The Radio Access Network (RAN) is the final link between the network and the user equipment. Traditionally it has been a proprietary and closed solution from RAN vendors.
Over the past few months, the concept of ‘Open RAN’ has been transforming communication networks. Arguably, it has been one of the most important pieces of network ‘unbundling’ to have happened, allowing mobile network operators to introduce open architecture and eliminate the proprietary nature of RAN systems. It has given operators the freedom to diversify the vendor supply chain, ushering in real innovation, reducing the cost of RAN deployment and operation.
The development of Open RAN is still in its relative infancy, with only a few, small scale deployments. There are still many challenges ahead that need to be addressed before it goes full mainstream.
Sustaining sustainability
Preliminary work on 6G includes identifying ways to minimize its carbon footprint. For example, in January, ATIS’ Next G Alliance published “Green G: The Path Towards Sustainable 6G,” a white paper describing opportunities to reduce energy consumption and achieve environmental sustainability.
A few weeks later, GSMA Intelligence published “The Carbon-Neutral Mobile Network,” which explores the work underway for 5G. The report found that ‘90% of operators rate energy efficiency and sustainability as a priority, in line with other must haves such as security’.
To optimize the energy consumption, it is important for MNOs to have detailed understanding about where and when energy is consumed, and which factors are influencing this consumption. An accurate metering system is a prerequisite to make sure that energy consumption can be properly monitored, measured, and optimized. In January NGMN published a whitepaper on “Green Future Networks – Metering for Sustainable Networks”, to identify not only the sensing but also the necessary infrastructure to collect, transmit and use the information obtained for a better management and improvement of the network.
Achieving these goals for 5G and 6G will take considerable work. Emerging use cases and devices demand higher network capacity, leading to increasingly dense infrastructure. Although the 5G NR standard is more energy efficient per gigabyte than 4G standards, the proposed 5G use cases and new spectrum bands will require many more mobile sites, outstripping potential energy efficiencies. The good news is that these challenges can and will be overcome, meaning a fast, open and greener future in 2022 and beyond.
