5G ecosystem continues to grow at a fast pace in all geographies.
5G ecosystem continues to grow at a fast pace in all geographies. In this year alone, 5G networks grew by 22 times, 5G users increased by 500 times, and devices recorded a growth of 32 times. The good news is that this growth will continue over the next few years.
"The next ten years are the years of mobile data. New 5G-powered Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) users will be ten times more than wired broadband. By 2030, the cellular network will be transmitting more data than wired networks.
However, more data comes with its own challenges for the service providers. The network architecture needs to change to be able to address this growing data consumption. It is crucial to maximize the value of macro sites to address the problem of the limited spectrum and limited power. This is also important to build a high bandwidth foundation for network coverage.
Several new technology approaches are helping the telcos get the maximum mileage from deploying 5G:
Meta AAU for improved network performance and lower energy consumption
Typically, telcos follow the strategy of adding a new network layer for every new technology. This leads to network complexity. Further, this strategy is not possible with 5G since it uses spectrum from multiple frequency bands, and it is not possible to add several new boxes on the tower. A combination of ultrawideband and massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is the only way out. The next innovation direction of mMIMO is better performance and lower energy consumption.
FDD gigaband module enables green & high-efficiency sub-3GHz sites towards 5Gigaverse
For legacy sub-3GHz spectrum evolution to ultrawideband 4T/8T and Massive MIMO is the way to go. "If we use ultrawideband technology, three boxes can become one box, thus saving space (rental), reducing power consumption and allowing the telcos to extend the channel from 4T to 8T in the FDD bands to increase capacity, coverage and performance," .
The FDD Gigaband module has been commercialized in more than 100 countries with more than 100,000 shipments.
Distributed massive MIMO to address Indoor coverage challenges
Several new 5G use cases also demand ultra-high-speed, more bandwidth, and extremely low latency in the indoor environment. There are three main challenges in the 5G era in indoor coverage. First is the Quality of Service (QoS) in traditional public scenarios, like hospitals, where indoor 5G networks demand high capacity for both consumer and enterprise use cases. The second is the difficulty for telcos to proceed in-building implementation of capacity expansion when data consumption is booming fast, and the third challenge is the enterprise market, which is new for telcos and has critical demands. Distributed mMIMO coordinates indoor 4T4R small cells to perform joint beamforming and multi-user MIMO in the indoor environment.
Connecting the unconnected to achieve UN SDGs
5G is growing in popularity in most cities, but 450 million people are still not covered by the mobile network in rural areas. Since 2017, Huawei has connected more than 50 million people in more than 60 countries. In Ghana, the Government will deploy more than 2000 Huawei's RuralStar sites in the first phase, and the ROI is expected to be achieved in 3 years. Data from the 400 RuralStar sites shows that voice traffic grows 100%, while data traffic grows 400%. It has led to an increase in GDP, employment and mobile penetration. We helped Ghana in fulfilling SDG goals.
5G RAN intelligence to maximise spectrum efficiency and improve optimisation efficiency
Rollouts of 5G networks across the world picked up pace throughout these years. As operators boost their CAPEX budgets to reap the potential benefits of 5G networks, they also face the blunt reality of rising network complexity. In addition to rising OPEX, maintenance efficiency drops while network complexity significantly increases. This further highlights the urgency of developing intelligent wireless networks.5G RAN Intelligence covers SingleBAND and Capacity Turbo, to promote intelligent wireless networks.