The markets for 5G and edge computing are rapidly
converging. Telcos are poised to leverage both technologies to move beyond
being a simple connectivity provider to an enabler of innovative
applications.
RTInsights recently sat down with Douglas Lieberman, Global Solutions Director, Dell Technologies, to discuss how 5G enables edge, how telcos can use 5G and edge, and what types of applications we might see when using both. Here is a summary of our discussion.
What is
the 5G telco journey?
RTInsights: What is the 5G telco journey?
Lieberman: The 5G telco journey is about an evolution
from the current state of the telco industry focusing in large part on
connectivity around 3G and 4G and taking that to the next level. The change is
needed because of things that have happened over the last decade. For example, many
telcos are now content creators, content distributors, and more. On the
connectivity side, 5G enables the telcos to provide a new route to customers
for new workloads and new applications that we haven’t been able to address
previously in the wireless space for end devices. The increased speed, the
lower latency, the performance guarantees that you can get with 5G, and the way
you can control it, allow you to tailor the network to achieve what you want it
to do, based on a workload.
Previous implementations of wireless technology were pretty
much fixed. What you got is what you got. Wherever you were, if you got a 4G
LTE connection, that’s what you got, and whether you were running your Facebook
app or a video, you got the same kind of connectivity. While that worked well in
the past, today, we have things like the explosion of video to your device, and
people want to leverage other technologies on top of it. Telcos must leverage
technologies including buffering and use of content distribution networks that
move data closer or distribute them worldwide to get them properly aligned to
where the maximum return will be, reducing back-end bandwidth on the network.
The next generation of 5G will have some new applications
that we probably haven’t even identified yet. And those applications are going
to be the killer apps of the next decade. So, when the smartphones were
announced and became a real thing back in the early 2000s, no one had even
envisioned yet what you would be able to do with them. No one thought you’d
have phones with three cameras on it, would take 3D pictures, and do augmented
reality – on a phone. All these apps have increasingly pushed the limits of
what the end devices can do. And through that, have really driven the journey
of what people are expecting out of the next generation, and with 5G, whose use
expands far beyond just the mobile device we have in our pocket. We’ve been
talking about things like IoT and edge computing for a long time, but in the 4G
space, it was more of a conversation about the art of the possible, rather than
the implementation of the here and now.
What 5G will do is expand the breadth of what telcos can
support in the wireless space beyond those end mobile devices. It will let
telcos support enterprise, industrial, retail, and commercial applications that
were possible within the 4G space but weren’t practical in many places. 5G also
enables new applications. When you talk about automation, industrial
synchronization, smart cars, all these technologies require much higher
bandwidth, much lower latency, and a guaranteed amount of what I can get out of
the network with tailored access to that network. That’s what 5G is providing.
What I’m trying to say is the 5G telco journey is about
evolving the telcos from being a bulk wireless bandwidth provider to being a
partner for your business and to provide you with a custom experience in the
wireless space to meet the specific demands of an application that you may
have. Some of those applications we know about today. But many of them are
going to evolve and be created out of the implementation of 5G. When they first
put gigabit fiber into people’s homes, it was considered a gimmick. Nowadays,
those of us who have gigabit are thrilled and can’t imagine that we would be
able to survive without it when we’ve got four people working from home, all
doing Zoom meetings at the same time, plus having whatever else we have running
over the network.
Eventually, the technology expands to fill the space, or the
solutions expand to fill the space that technology has provided. When 5G is
available across the entire country and across the world, applications and use
cases will fill that space and quickly leverage to the maximum capacity of what’s
there. For the telcos, that’s going to mean looking at different business
models and adjusting to how they deal with enterprises and customers to provide
a customized experience.
How does 5G enable Edge
computing?
RTInsights: How does 5G enable Edge computing?
Lieberman: 5G and edge go hand-in-hand because of 5G’s
lower latency and the higher bandwidth. The much higher bandwidth is driving
the need to put capabilities as close to the edge as possible. And by the edge,
we’re talking about how close to where the wireless signal becomes electrons,
do we produce and distribute services and capabilities that work in concert
with the devices that are connecting. Whether those devices be mobile phones,
cars, IoT sensors, or something else, 5G and the network capabilities enable
the telco to customize and provide specific processing for that data. So, in
the past, if you look at the previous networks, they were pretty much fixed in the
way they work. Whether they were packet cores or circuits, how they operated
was very much locked in from the day they were built and implemented.
In contrast, 5G is being implemented using open technologies
and in many cases off the shelf components like servers, storage, and virtualization.
Because of this, it is enabling the telcos to dynamically adjust the network to
address the demands of applications running on the network at any given time.
Using network virtualization and slicing of the network, the telcos can truly provide
capabilities at the edge and across the entire network – essentially edge-to-edge.
So, as the radio signal comes into the tower, instead of having to send that
data all the way back to a central data center before being processed and sent
back out to the edge, they’re able to effectively bend the pipe. That means
they can process the data locally at the tower and then send the data back out.
Such an approach enables all sorts of new capabilities that hadn’t been fully
leveraged in the past.
5G is an ideal enabler for augmented reality and smart cars.
In these applications, information must be received, processed, and returned as
soon as possible, as near to real-time as possible, for safety, efficiency, and
effectiveness. An example I’ve used a few times is direct marketing to people.
If you’re walking down the street and you walk in front of a storefront, a store
in the future might want to provide directed marketing to you specifically, so
not everyone sees the same signs. On your phone or in the store, if there is some sort of a window display, they would want
to respond to you in the few seconds that it takes for you to walk in front of
their store – they want to be able to
recognize who you are, collate content that would be interesting to you, and
deliver that content to you.
Those kinds of things are only possible through 5G with its lower
latency and the higher bandwidth combined with Edge. They’re able to place
information and processing as close to the edge as possible to get that
marketing response as I’m walking past the storefront, rather than after I’ve
already passed it. The combination of the open network design, off the shelf
components, virtualization, and all the different capabilities that are going
into building these new 5G networks leads to the point where you’re effectively
building what’s called an edge cloud. The telcos are building all these edge clouds
– effectively thousands or tens of thousands of micro clouds. They are sitting
near the edge to do all the processing and the network virtualization and
things like applying the slicing and the segmentation of the data from the
moment it enters the network to the moment it leaves. Because of that, it’s
creating the opportunity to also leverage the automation, the orchestration,
and the control of those edge clouds that exist everywhere and put them
together into a coordinated cloud across all those nodes. In addition to
providing network functions, network function virtualization, and all the
things they need to run the 5G network, they also run end-user applications and
workloads.
Enterprises can build applications that run near the Edge or
on the Edge in either unused capacity or additional capacity, which would be
built and orchestrated with the rollout of 5G. That additional capacity and
those workloads will let companies deploy applications to directly address
real-time type needs for end customers like augmented reality. So, as I’m
walking down the street, I’m possibly getting popups. If I’m a tourist and I’m
walking down the street, I can look at my phone, and it’s bringing up real-time
insights about all the things I’m seeing while I’m walking down the street.
We’re not talking about just playing Pokemon and the latest
gaming applications. If I’m a tourist in London and I’ve opted into an app, as I’m
walking by some major landmarks, as I’m walking by, without any delay
whatsoever, I’m getting in real-time all sorts of information popping up about
what’s in front of me, how long are the lines, what’s the cost to get in, and what
their hours are. And as opposed to being just a search, where it takes a couple
of seconds to get the response, the application is layering the information on
top of the map in real-time with real pictures. At the same time, it can be
streaming coordinates back to my friends or my group that I happen to be with,
and possibly generating through augmented or through artificial intelligence
social media posts about what I’m doing.
All these things are interesting ways that the edge will
change how we view technology. 5G is what’s driving the implementation of edge
clouds. These edge clouds are the underlying network infrastructure required
for 5G. And because this infrastructure will be there, it can also be extended to
be used for enterprise and business use cases.
How do Edge
and 5G help telcos transform?
RTInsights: Beyond connectivity and phones, how do Edge
and 5G help telcos transform?
Lieberman: 5G provides opportunities for telcos to be
addressing the market in a whole different way. In the 2G, 3G, 4G space, it was
just a kind of a bulk offering. I buy some bandwidth, get X number of gigabits
per month, or so many messages, and whatever fits into that application fits
into that application. Whether that’s a phone, your connected car, an infotainment
system in cars, or mapping applications, it was pretty much, if it fits in the
bandwidth, it’s there. 5G expands that aperture quite significantly. And if you
think about it, it even has broader applications, for example, let’s talk about
home broadband.
Up until now, you could run your home broadband off of a 4G
or an LTE connection. The performance you would get out of that is dwarfed by
what you would get for wired connections. So, if you have a one-gigabit
connection running into your house, either through FIOS or through Google
gigabit internet services, those connectivity demands dwarf what you could support
from the wireless side. In many cases, the same telco is running the wire and providing
the wireless connectivity. But if you think about the cost of the
infrastructure of running fiber to someone’s home versus putting up a tower and
serving many homes, 5G now becomes really, really interesting for a telco. It
offers a telco the ability to deliver broadband type capabilities without
having the cost and expense of running all those hard-line cables into people’s
homes (and prevents the issue of losing connectivity when planting a tree).
Additionally, 5G has some very interesting implications. For
example, consider people that live in areas like in the Northeast where there’s
a lot of snow every winter, and we lose power, and we lose connectivity
regularly. Wireless keeps running because of the infrastructure and the way it
is deployed. When you lose power, or you lose internet connectivity at your
home because your power is out, you generally can still get your wireless signal
from the telcos. You have a much more resilient and reliable capability.
Take the current situation that we’re in due to the pandemic.
Things changed drastically earlier this year with most people working from
home. Going forward, all the estimates are that we’re not going to go back 100%
to where we were before. The transition to work from home changes how we think
about what our home is.
In the past, our home was a consumer type environment. Only
3.2% of the workforce in the US worked from home more than 50% of the time.
Going forward, they’re expecting that even when this whole situation is
resolved, that 30% or more of the workforce is going to be working from home
more than 50% of the time. What that means is that your home is now no longer
just your home, your home is your office, and it’s your school for your kids. Because
of that, the types of services that a telco needs to be offering into the home
are changing drastically. As an example, if I had connectivity from my provider
that could optimize and provide quality of service for Zoom calls over YouTube,
I would do that in a heartbeat, right?
If I had the opportunity as an enterprise to be able to say, look, I don’t want my workers who are working from home to have their devices connected to an unprotected home internet connection. Instead, I’m going to provide everyone with a 5G connection in their house, either directly on the laptop or via a hotspot that connects back into my corporate enterprise. Such a setup, leveraging 5G slicing, provides clean internet access for those devices, as though they were sitting in the office, but while they’re sitting at home. People need cyber protection and quality of service. The service needs to ensure that when I’m having a critical Zoom meeting with a customer, my kid playing Fortnite won’t take all the bandwidth causing jitter or frozen screens during my meeting.
Moving forward, as working from home becomes more of a
normal situation, and your house is your office, we will drastically change how
we think about connectivity. It’s now no longer going to be just a pipe. It’s
going to be, what other services can I get around it? What guarantees can I
get? How can I custom shape that connectivity to meet the demands of what I
need to do as an employee working from home? And that’s connectivity. Think of
the benefits 5G can deliver for other end applications like the Internet of Things,
smart sensors, and digital cities.
The promise of 5G is the ability to use the same radio
technology, regardless of whether I’m inside, outside, at a stadium, at home,
walking down the street, or more. As we all know, today we bounce back and
forth between Wi-Fi and our 4G/5G connectivity, depending on where you are.
If you are inside a building, generally speaking, you’re
hunting for that Wi-Fi hotspot, and you’re using a different mechanism on your
phone to do that. One of the promises of 5G would be to make it easier for
consumers to be always-on, always-connected everywhere. If you can reduce the
number of different ways they connect and it’s just more seamless, it becomes
easier. And then, with some of the capabilities of 5G and the ability to
provide profiles and slicing and different rules to how you operate, as you’re
roaming around, you have a greater opportunity for controlling how that
connectivity works, enabling much more interaction between devices.
In the 4G world, a lot of end devices were independent. In
the 5G world, devices are now going to interact not just with the cloud and
with things that are fixed, but with each other. If you think about industrial
automation, where you have different robots on a factory line needing to
integrate and interact with very time-sensitive motions – those things are not possible
in the 4G world. The timing is not guaranteed, the latency is too high, and you
can’t provide an SLA [service level agreement] for that service.
5G has extremely low latencies. We’re talking about going
from 20 milliseconds down to one millisecond in some cases and gigabits of
bandwidth. Interconnected industrial automation machines could use 5G as a
mechanism for connectivity and be time-synced to provide the necessary level of
automation between them. This is also a key driver for telemedicine, augmented reality,
remote surgeries, smart cities, and others.
As enterprises want to leverage 5G to the maximum extent,
they will start with the telcos because, ultimately, there’s licensed and
unlicensed band spectrum. By going with a telco, you’re able to customize that
experience both in your building privately, plus your regular usage out in the
public. Ultimately, this results in a more tuned service to exactly what you
need it to do, rather than just dealing with whatever you get.
What does
the future hold?
RTInsights: What’s in store for the future? What are
some of the possible applications and services that we’ll see, thanks to 5G and
edge?
Lieberman: 5G
and edge will build the platform upon which some killer app will evolve, and
the technology will expand to fill the space. In the 3G space, it wasn’t
possible to do streaming video and watching MASH episodes when you’re sitting
at the airport, but with 4G and LTE, that became not only possible but the
norm. Video was the killer app for 4G and drove the massive expansion of
bandwidth that people use. As bandwidth was provided, the applications expanded
to consume it.
With 5G and edge, we will have newly developed apps that
will absolutely consume whatever bandwidth is provided by that service. Those
apps are going to be enabled and made better by using 5G. We might see things
like real-time 3D sporting events with augmented reality or virtual reality,
where you can interact with the game as though you were playing. And so, you’re
no longer just watching the game, but you are in some way on the field and
maybe participating virtually in what-if scenarios or seeing if you would have
been able to catch that football that was thrown by Nick Foles in the end zone.
These are some crazy ideas, but through 5G and Edge, they become
much more realistic. 5G provides the bandwidth it takes to stream that amount
of video. The real-time response to what you’re doing in the augmented reality
space or virtual reality space will require edge processing and will drive
interesting new capabilities.
Shorter-term, 5G and edge will be used for things like autonomous
and connected cars. In Israel, I recently read that they’re installing the
first, basically self-charging public transportation through the streets. So,
they’re aligning the different bus routes with charging capability embedded underneath
the street. The buses charge as they drive and will no longer be required to go
back to charging stations between routes.
If you combine that with 5G and edge capabilities, with the
lower latency, now you’re getting closer to having the ability to have fully autonomous,
self-charging, always running, 24×7 bus services. They would be able to get the
data they need about traffic and change in routes. They could use the data for
optimization. If there’s no one waiting at a stop, maybe we can skip that stop
or take a better route. There also are industrial automation examples.
In these near-term applications, we expand beyond what we
know as Wi-Fi today because 5G offers better throughput than today’s Wi-Fi. Now,
Wi-Fi 6, which has more bandwidth, is coming out. 5G and Wi-Fi keep
leapfrogging each other. But I go back to when I was talking about the desire
to have a unified wireless profile. 5G will enable things like people sitting
in stadiums and dynamically interacting with what’s going on, without the
constraints of what Wi-Fi provides today. Certainly, when you’re in a stadium
with 50,000 people, you can get a Wi-Fi signal, and you can do a certain amount
of interactivity. But it’s limited because of the constraints of that part of
the spectrum and the bandwidth that can be provided, and by the way, the Wi-Fi
protocol is written, and a lot of contention happens there. Additionally, the infrastructure
required for large-scale 5G deployments is significantly less than what would
be required for Wi-Fi – in our stadium for example, a Wi-Fi implementation
would require dozens if not hundreds of access points, where 5G will require
only a handful of radios.
With 5G, it’s meant to be a carrier-grade wireless signal
that can support connectivity for dense populations. You’ll have a much more interactive experience
in those stadiums and in connecting up campuses, schools, restaurants, hotels,
and apartment buildings – anyplace there is a very high density of people in a
very small amount of space.
5G by itself will offer a lot of improvements about how
connectivity works in those places. What we’re going to see is companies
building innovative new applications. They will take advantage of the lower
latency and higher bandwidth that run at the edge and provide instantaneous
results and real-time applications back to the end-users. It will enable new
applications and new capabilities that we don’t even know how to talk about
because they haven’t been invented yet.
So, we don’t know what the killer application for 5G is
going to be. I guarantee you that in five years, when we have a follow-up to
this interview, we’re going to be looking back and talking about, “Wow,
that was an amazing app.”
It’s going to be an interesting ride over the next five to
10 years, and what we look at as the role of the telco in that, in how they
provide those capabilities and the journey they’re on, we’re going to see a
complete transformation of telcos. They will go from a type of utility supplier
that provides just bandwidth to companies to be partners to enterprises. They
will help them build applications and build services around the connectivity
that drive end-to-end value and not just pure bandwidth. Ultimately, we’ll see
telcos embracing the enterprise, commercial, and consumer markets and becoming
much more of a partner in that ecosystem.
To learn more, please register here to join Doug in a live webinar on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, at 11:00AM ET as he and Adam Mendoza discuss, “The evolving Telco landscape: Driving organizational success.”
