5G is set to be a key enabler of technology convergence, adoption, and digital transformation. The benefits are clear — it offers significant improvements in speed, latency, availability, and enhanced performance with the eventual introduction of end-to-end network slicing.
Asia has some of the highest quality 5G experiences, particularly in mature markets like South Korea and Taiwan.
Additionally, countries like Malaysia, India, Indonesia are quickly catching up with new waves of 5G network rollouts. This paints a bright picture for the region, with mature economies in the region expecting to lead the way in 5G adoption at 53 per cent connection rate penetration by 2025, according to the GSMA Mobile Economy 2021 report.
However, the reality is that the rate of 5G adoption in individual markets is as diverse as the region. The evolution from 4G to 5G is a multi-year commitment.
Every mobile and wholesale network operator has a unique start and end point that is differentiated by their business objectives, target end-users, market needs, maturity of available infrastructure, and application spaces.
Against this backdrop, what should service providers (SPs) in Asia do to stay ahead in the 5G race?
The growth of 5G, higher-speed broadband adoption, and enterprise requirements for cloud services are pushing SPs and content providers to build and scale their network closer to their customers. As the network edge rapidly evolves, having an efficient metro network architecture to meet city-wide connectivity demands — while maintaining scalable operations — is critical.
That's where new coherent routing platforms that provide improvements in power, cooling, and transport operational efficiency, can become game-changers.
These platforms enter at a time when there is growing appetite for broadband initiatives that will drive aggressive passive optical network (PON) deployments and increase demand for aggregation of network traffic at the edge.
SPs want adaptable routing platforms that will simplify operations, reduce costs, and eliminate the need for manual technician intervention.
Beyond faster Internet connections for consumers, 5G is also poised to boost the adoption of other digital technologies and improve everything from financial services, education, to retail. These compute-intensive and latency-sensitive applications will place additional pressure on network capacities.
M1, Singapore's first digital network operator, is using Blue Planet's intent-based, model-driven Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) product to accomplish this. As part of its transformation programme to become a platform-based digital services provider, M1 is eliminating all legacy systems, replacing them with a cloud-native, best-of-breed digital platform.
In a Blue Planet podcast, M1's Chief Digital Officer, Nathan Bell, described its digital platform as "Amazonesque," noting that M1 now offers customers a zero-touch process for ordering services which includes the ability to "order it online — no human touches it — and it comes out the other end as a fully activated and integrated service."
In a 5G world, relying on manual provisioning and management processes, such as root-cause analysis and event-based monitoring, is simply not sustainable. It is important to note that many core assurance requirements are not changing.
SPs still need to collect, correlate, and visualize network events — performance metrics, faults, and alarms, for example — and fix problems manually. However, to build effective 5G networks, SPs now need to do it at a massive scale.
To resolve this challenge, SPs need an additional level of intelligent automation that can only be provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate the trouble-shooting process, to deliver the cloud-like network experiences customers want. This can help SPs identify problems before they affect customers and lower operational costs in the long run.
Intelligent automation also enables network slicing. Automation is essential at every stage of the service lifecycle because over thousands of dynamic network slices will need to be provisioned in real-time across physical, virtual, and cloud-based domains. The resulting complexity simply will not be manageable using manual processes.
Although incorporating intelligent automation into service assurance will not happen instantly, we can expect SPs to gradually introduce new capabilities in this area.
What's worth noting is that it is an uphill task to invest and innovate in all areas of the 5G network ecosystem and still deliver best-in-class network technologies and products.
Thus, cross-vendor collaboration via partnerships is required to ensure that the end-to-end 5G network ecosystem maintains pace with the frantic innovation timelines associated with applications and use-cases in both the consumer and enterprise markets.
The ecosystem approach is not new, as we have already seen industry associations like GSMA and countries like Singapore forming partnerships to explore potential opportunities to deliver Industry 4.0 and digital transformation from 5G networks, edge-cloud services, enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) and AI.
SPs must realise the benefits of coming onboard these ecosystems, and leverage capabilities of partners to advance their own 5G agendas.
2022 will be pivotal for 5G. But getting there is a journey that requires intelligent automation every step of the way — from network planning through implementation and monetization.
Even so, SPs do not need to fight a lonely battle, and instead should leverage on ecosystem partners to combine expertise, knowledge, and experience to ensure they are in pole position to establish themselves as the winners in Asia's 5G race.
The writer is Vice-President, Portfolio and Engineering, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times