J U N E 2 0 1 6
GETTING TO STANDALONE 5GReal-time applications and new service revenue opportunities
By Sean Kinney
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A U G U S T 2 0 2 0
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
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Introduction
With one notable exception,
commercial 5G networks use
a non-standalone architecture
wherein new 5G NR radio in-
frastructure is connected to an
Evolved Packet Core that also sup-
ports LTE data transmissions. Vir-
tualization of EPC functionality
is common but stops short of the
cloud-native core network needed
for a standalone 5G implementa-
tion. With non-standalone 5G, the
emphasis is on delivering enhanced
mobile broadband to consumers.
To enable the full feature set of
5G, including reduced latency, high
reliability and support for massive
numbers of connected devices, op-
erators need to adopt a standalone
5G architecture.
From standardization to com-
mercialization, 5G has largely been
ahead of schedule. The transition to
standalone is ramping up too; in the
U.S. T-Mobile has activated stand-
alone for its low-band 5G network
and Verizon and AT&T plan to make
the jump in the coming months.
While standalone brings numerous
benefits, perhaps chief among them
a clearer path to enterprise service
revenues, the timing is logical and in
step with broader strategies.
As Ericsson’s Peter Linder, head of
5G marketing in North America, put
it, “When we accelerated the stan-
dard and said we can do 5G at the end
of 2018 rather than the end of 2020,
we did not have the ability then to
do both core and radio at the same
time. We said, ‘Let’s focus on doing all
the radio stuff first in way that it’s
as easy as we can possibly make it to
connect into an existing EPC that’s
upgraded with 5G capabilities.”
Speaking on Arden Media’s pod-
cast Will 5G Change the World?,
Oracle’s John Lenns, vice president
of product management, sized up
the standalone transition based
on three types of operators: early
adopters, fast followers and the
mass market. With early adopters,
“You’ll see some standalone archi-
tecture networks going live this
calendar year.” The fast followers
are “putting out requests for infor-
mation to prepare themselves for
issuing RFPs, and the mass market
is still further out into the future.”
As far as what considerations are
top of mind as operators strategize
and invest in standalone 5G, Lenns
highlighted security and rapid se-
curity responsiveness and cost effi-
ciencies both capital and operating.
“From a capex perspective, they are
looking for an efficient transition
through virtualization to cloud-na-
tive. They don’t want to pay twice.
From an opex perspective, they are
recognizing that assembling this
5G solution...is a challenge. It’s not
easy...The CSPs are looking for solu-
tions that make that opex journey
less expensive. How that manifests
itself is they are looking for a solu-
tion that offer them efficiencies
of deployment, more automation,
more embedded test tools, more
self-healing behavior.”
From non-standalone to standalone 5G
“The biggest thing that will have an impact on the total costs is the automation. You have to automate as much as you possibly can.”
Peter Linder, Head of 5G Marketing, Ericsson North America
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Just like moving from 3G to 4G
or from 4G to 5G, the shift from a
non-standalone architecture to a
standalone architecture is a gradu-
al and phased movement informed
by the mix of assets a particular op-
erator has and strategic service of-
fering priorities. Using standalone
to solve for coverage is very dif-
ferent than using standalone and
other technological capabilities
to enable a smart manufacturing
facility. During these phased tran-
sitions, operators will use a mix of
virtualized network functions and
containerized network functions
running in a cloud-native core.
The co-mingling of EPC and
cloud-native architectures led Er-
icsson to develop its dual-mode 5G
core. “The difference between EPC
and 5G core is essentially an archi-
tectural difference and how you
operate and execute around that,”
Linder said. “When we looked at all
the different migration options...
we came to the conclusion that the
only way you could secure a smooth
evolution for service providers is to
combine EPC and 5G core. The dual
mode is essentially about giving the
option of doing either EPC or 5G
core or EPC and 5G core combined.”
In that combined scenario, “You can
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cut and freeze the investment in
the current physical and virtual-
ized platforms. Over time you can
start phasing out both physical and
virtualized EPC and have every-
thing supported by the 5G core.”
Recall Lenns’ comment about not
wanting to pay twice.
Linder continued: “The move from
virtualized to cloud-native elimi-
nates integration steps. People went
through so much pain depending
on which virtualization [solutions]
they used on which hardware. Right
now, moving toward cloud-native,
that takes away a lot of that cost.”
Another key factor he identified
relates to opex. With standalone,
“The biggest thing that will have an
impact on the total costs is the au-
tomation. You have to automate as
much as you possibly can.”
In an August 25 announcement,
Verizon gave a good look at this evo-
lutionary process from non-stand-
alone to standalone 5G, the role of
the vEPC and how it relates to net-
work slicing and edge computing,
both of which we explore further
in this report. Verizon described its
latest as an “end-to-end fully virtu-
alized 5G data session,” and called it
a “technology milestone [that] pro-
vides the foundation for Verizon to
rapidly respond to customers’ var-
ied latency and computing needs
by providing the foundation for
wide-scale mobile edge computing
and network slicing.” While Veri-
zon is is planning a phased move
to standalone as early as this year,
this particular data session used
the operators vEPC and non-stand-
alone 5G network.
Verizon concurrently called out
its RAN virtualization efforts and
looked ahead to using general-pur-
pose hardware “Instead of adding
or upgrading single-purpose hard-
ware, the move to a cloud-native,
container-based virtualized archi-
tecture with standardized inter-
faces leads to greater flexibility,
faster delivery of services, greater
scalability, and improved cost effi-
ciency in networks.”
SVP of Technology and Planning
Adam Koeppe said in a statement,
“Virtualizing the entire network
from the core to the edge has been a
massive, multi-year redesign effort
of our network network architec-
ture that simplifies and modernizes
our entire network.” This demon-
stration used vRAN equipment pro-
vided by Samsung Networks and
used Intel FlexRAN software refer-
ence architecture, Xeon processor
and FPGA acceleration card.
“Massive scale IOT solutions, more
robust consumer devices and solu-
tions, AR/VR, remote healthcare,
autonomous robotics in manufac-
turing environments, and ubiqui-
tous smart city solutions are only
some of the ways we will be able
to deliver the promise of the digital
world. Advancements in virtualiza-
tion technology are critical steps to-
wards that realization,” Koeppe said.
In this move from non-standalone
to standalone and interworking of
cloud-native and legacy systems,
Rohde & Schwarz Technology Man-
ager Andreas Roessler cautioned
that there’s always a “pro and con.
SA allows [operators] to implement
an end-to-end service-based archi-
tecture...but one may watch out
that this does not effect any loss
of connectivity due to legacy tech-
nology not being supported. Metic-
ulous network deployment is the
key, as always.”
Roessler also gave an important
description of the change in ac-
cess procedure when shifting from
non-standalone to standalone 5G.
With SA, “The UE needs to syn-
chronize autonomously to the 5G
carrier frequency and to acquire
the essential system information
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broadcasted within SIB Type 1.
Once the UE has that, it knows all
the required parameters to per-
form the access procedure and con-
nect with the network. The scan-
ning process for SSB blocks is the
same except the UE does not have
any prior information like in NSA
mode...The prioritization of SSBs is
the same as in NSA mode. For the
detected SSBs, the UE would mea-
sure signal quality (RSRP, RSRQ,
SINR), which needs to be above a
network-defined threshold. For all
the detected and measured SSBs
that are above the threshold, the UE
will randomly but with equal prob-
ability select one SSB, and use the
associated time-frequency resource
in uplink direction to perform the
access procedure.”
Another important theme asso-
ciated with the move to not just
standalone 5G but fully virtualized
networks complete with edge com-
puting capabilities is that telecom
networks are becoming more like
IT networks – software-defined net-
working and a shift toward commod-
ity hardware is familiar to compa-
nies like HPE which sees significant
opportunity in 5G.
Domenico Convertino, vice pres-
ident of product management for
HPE’s Communication and Media
Solutions business unit, told us,
“When we started looking at 5G...we
were coming from a presence in the
mobile core--2G, 3G, 4G--that was
pretty much subscriber data man-
agement. Looking at the way 3GPP
was defining the [5G NR] standard
at that time, we thought that this
was going to be a huge opportuni-
ty for a company like HPE. What
the telcos are trying to adopt now
is a transformation to cloud-native
that enterprise IT started many
years ago.”
He continued: “We tried to take a
position, as a company, first to pro-
vide the right infrastructure for
5G because 5G is coming with dif-
ferent performance and scalabili-
ty requirements. The second thing
is to look at the access network of
the mobile operator of the future–
more and more convergent with an
edge cloud. And from a pure soft-
ware point of view, the idea was to
help telcos adopt all the best prac-
tices of IT and the simplification
cloud brought to IT, all those best
practices that, at the end of the
day, can dramatically reduce the
cost of ownership.”
From a product side, HPE in March
announced its Core Stack which
the company describes as including
“stateless containerized network
functions…a shared data environ-
ment…a common platform as a
service (PaaS) architecture, end-to-
end management and orchestration
(MANO), and automation frame-
work, all pre-integrated on carri-
er-grade infrastructure as a service.”
The company noted current em-
phasis on 5G RAN investments but
said the “true value” of 5G emerges
when a new core is introduced; “this
enables holistic management, data
sharing, and slicing into virtual 5G
networks with dedicated usage and
characteristics.”
HPE’s VP and GM of Communica-
tions and Media Solutions Phil Mot-
tram tied 5G core adoption to new
service-based revenue opportuni-
ties. “Investing in a new 5G network
before the revenue streams are
there is a financial and technical
challenge for many carriers, but...
telcos can start deployments today
and pay for the infrastructure as
their revenue grows.”
Helping telcos monetize 5G is
a primary focus for VoltDB. The
company sees properly handling
growing data volumes and transac-
tional speeds as key to turning 5G
investments into service revenues;
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as such, VoltDB is helping opera-
tors make decisions in the sub-10
millisecond range.
Chief Product Officer Dheeraj
Remella explained, “Data is not a
database problem anymore. Data is
a data problem. What is the value
you’re missing with your existing
choices that you can get if you
think differently?” In the context
of standalone 5G and a contain-
erized, microservices-based ap-
proach, “You’re not only storing
data and asking for data but rath-
er you are using this platform to
signal the next component in your
service mesh to start doing its job
as soon as it’s required. You have to
have data storage and data stream
processing capabilities to have a
cohesive service flow.”
Operator focus: T-Mobile
In Early August, T-Mobile
claimed a world’s first with the
launch of a nationwide standalone
5G network that uses its 600 MHz
spectrum. T-Mo initially launched
its 600 MHz 5G network last year and
reached nationwide coverage--200
million people covered--using the
non-standalone architecture. With
the shift to standalone, the oper-
ator saw a coverage expansion of
30% to 1.3 million square miles, up-
ping population coverage to 250
million, and a 40% reduction in la-
tency. Before we look ahead, let’s
look back at some milestones in
T-Mobile’s journey to standalone.
In August 2019, T-Mobile completed
a standalone 5G over the air data
session using multi-vendor kit in a
Bellevue, Washington lab. Vendor
support came from Ericsosn, Nokia,
Cisco and MediaTek.
T-Mo announced another round
of standalone activities in May of
T-Mobile’s 600 MHz 5G coverage in non-standalone mode then in standalone modeIm
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this year. Working with Ericsson, the
companies completed a standalone
5G data session between commer-
cial modems on a production net-
work. They also completed a low-
band standalone 5G voice call with a
mechanism to fallback to Voice over
LTE (VoLTE), along with low-band
Voice over New Radio (VoNR) and
Video over New Radio (ViNR) calls.
With the standalone 5G network
up and running, T-Mobile Vice Pres-
ident of Radio Network Technology
and Strategy Karri Kuoppamaki
told RCR Wireless News, “It’s a huge
step forward in our evolution and
our plan to bring 5G for all--to ev-
eryone everywhere.”
T-Mobile is following a 5G spec-
tral strategy it often compares to
a layer cake. The low-band 600
MHz network provides wide area
coverage, 2.5 GHz spectrum ac-
quired from Sprint brings a bal-
ance of coverage and capacity,
and millimeter wave deployment
is reserved for urban cores and
other dense user environments.
“The benefit of SA is that it sort
of breaks the dependency on mid-
band spectrum which is sort of the
anchor for 5G in non-standalone
mode,” Kuoppamaki said. “This then
allows us to bring 5G on low-band
to areas that didn’t have 5G.” But
the transition is about more than
just coverage expansion, he said.
“The last [benefit], which I think is
probably one of the most important
benefits of this as well, is that it’s
really sort of a key to our 5G future
and many of these advanced fea-
tures that talked about in 5G.”
Asked about VoNR, Kuoppamaki
said it’s not supported today but,
“We’re working very hard to intro-
duce Voice over NR.” Discussing
how traffic is managed in areas
where standalone 600 MHz 5G and
non-standalone 2.5 GHz 5G are both
available, he said, “Non-standalone
and standalone are not mutually
exclusive,” noting the ability to
transition between the networks
based on application demand from
the UE. “This is an ever-changing
scenario,” he said.
“What drives us is obviously the
best customer experience and best
speed experience. I’d say that there
are a couple of different corner-
stones to our strategy. One is to push
5G evolution forward very, very
aggressively. We’re never going to
be happy with where it’s at at any
point in time. The second piece is to
deploy the spectrum assets we have
more broadly. The third one is just
in general to improve the network
and its coverage across the board. I
think those are the types of things
that are pushing us over time.”
Operator focus: Rakuten Mobile
Rakuten Mobile, the mo-
bile operator subsidiary of Japa-
nese e-commerce giant Rakuten,
launched LTE services this year on
top of a fully-virtualized, greenfield
network composed of 330 “far edge”
sites connected to 58 regional data
centers hosting vRAN workloads,
“It’s a huge step forward in our evolution and our plan to bring 5G for all – to everyone, everywhere.”
Karri Kuoppamaki, Vice President of Radio Network Technology and Strategy, T-Mobile
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and three central data centers that
primarily host control plane work-
loads. The operator currently uses
a virtualized evolved packet core
built following a Control and User
Plane Separation (CUPS) architec-
ture for LTE services.
Speaking during Light Reading’s
5G Networking Digital Symposium
in June, Rakuten Mobile EVP and
CTO Tareq Amin discussed the
company’s roadmap for evolving its
core network to non-standalone and
standalone architecture. On CUPs,
“We felt this was mandatory and
necessary if you wanted to offer
local breakout and true edge appli-
cations. We really pushed very hard
to enable this and enable it at scale.”
With its vEPC, Rakuten Mobile has
used a microservices-based archi-
tecture wherein software is decom-
posed into loosely coupled bits that
can be rapidly rearranged into var-
ious network functions. “In our net-
work,” Amin said, “because of the
microservices architecture that we
have implemented, we could really
have [an] infinite number of UPF
and control plane functions. What-
ever happens at any instance of time
in data center one, we could in real
time be able to carry the session in
data center two or three and be able
to manage this traffic.” This ability
to automatically move a workload
“started to point to possibilities and
ideas” about what a cloud-native ar-
chitecture can enable.
While Amin said the 198 unique
virtual network functions Rakuten
Mobile has deployed as virtual
machines running on OpenStack
is “amazing” compared to a propri-
etary implementation, “There is a
lot of things that are missing--quite
a bit actually. As elegant as this VM
architecture that we have done is,
we are not completely satisfied. We
need to get to a state in which we
are able to truly, truly have elastici-
ty...You never worry about capacity
“In the 5G core era, everything that we do must start with cloud-native. It has to have the personality and the architecture of microservices.”
Tareq Amin, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten Mobile
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anymore.” Which brings us to the
coming transition of the core net-
work to a cloud-native architecture.
Looking ahead to the activation
of non-standalone 5G and then the
transition to standalone, as well
as the future trajectory for the
LTE network’s vEPC, Amin said
the mission is to deploy all of it
on the company’s own cloud plat-
form. Rakuten Mobile is working
with compatriot firm NEC on what
Amin described as an “open core.”
That collaboration considers joint
development of a container-based
standalone core using source code
developed by NEC. The two firms
are also collaborating on manufac-
ture of 5G radio units.
Amin laid out his thinking on
using the LTE vEPC to support a
non-standalone launch, then dis-
cussed the next step. “The most
challenging thing in the cloud-na-
tive 5G core, in my opinion, is the
completion of a highly-scalable,
high-throughput UPF. I think the
control plane functions are rela-
tively straightforward. We want
to achieve a very good throughput
on our UPF containerized architec-
ture. We’re spending considerable
time with NEC on the development
of that feature. I don’t think NSA is
an exciting thing whatsoever. It just
gets us out there with higher band-
width and higher speed for the end
user. This is not where we want to
be. When we launch our 5G core, for
a period of time we will run them
in parallel. But 5G core, once built
with all containerized functions
and components, will collapse all
the 5G functions” into a single, con-
verged cloud-native core.
Operator focus: Vodafone UK
Vodafone U.K. sees stand-
alone 5G as a key enabler of ad-
vanced use cases like autonomous
vehicles, smart manufacturing, re-
mote surgery and the “internet of
senses,” according to materials pub-
lished by the operator. In pursuit
of that future, the operator in July
deployed a standalone 5G network
at Coventry University that will
be initially used to enable virtual
reality-based training for “student
nurses and allied health profession-
als,” the company said. The network
uses equipment from Ericsson, Me-
diaTek, OPPO and Qualcomm.
Coventry University’s Vice Chan-
cellor John Latham said the stand-
alone 5G network “will help us con-
tinue to change and enhance the
way students learn” and added that
the institution’s goal is “creating a
5G campus...We will soon be able to
reveal how we will use this tech-
nology to maximize the potential
of virtual reality teaching for our
Health and Life Sciences students.”
Vodafone U.K.’s Chief Technology
Officer Scott Petty said the current
focus of 5G is “increased speeds...
but it’s only the tip of the iceberg of
what 5G can do. With this new live
network we’re demonstrating the
future potential of 5G and how it
“From here, we will really start to see 5G make a difference to the way organisations think about being connected, and what’s possible with connectivity in the future.”
Scott Petty, Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone U.K.
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will be so valuable to the U.K. econ-
omy...From here, we will really start
to see 5G make a difference to the
way organizations think about be-
ing connected, and what’s possible
with connectivity in the future.”
Among the chief benefits stand-
alone 5G enables, Vodafone U.K.
calls out network slicing (more on
this later). The operator also notes
that the distribution of computing
power closer to where data is gen-
erated is key to fully realizing the
latency reductions made possible
by standalone.
Vodafone U.K. has offered com-
mercial 5G service since July 2019
and has availability in dozens of
cities as well as elsewhere in its
multi-national footprint, including
Ireland, Italy, Germany and Spain.
Leveraging latency requires
decentralized compute
As we’ve established, latency
reduction is a big selling point
for standalone 5G networks. Sin-
gle millisecond latency, combined
with ultra high capacity and
speeds, opens up real-time use cas-
es--things involving autonomous
assets, precision robotics and inte-
gration of augmented and virtual
reality into business processes. But
all of these applications depend on
real-time data creation, transport,
analysis and the action initiated
by that process. Regardless of the
latency on an airlink, if that data
has to be transported to a central
processing facility, it’s a wash. This
is the argument for decentralizing
data center functionality to edge
compute nodes.
Speaking of edge and core, Linder
said, “Those two are kind of yin and
yang in terms of functionality. We
expect them to be at the same loca-
tion. If you bring out edge compute
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“The MEC node can actually house the core. If the entire point of 5G is fatter pipes and lower latency, you can’t travel 1,500 miles [to a centralized data center]...and retain the low latency.”
Dheeraj Remella, Chief Product Officer, VoltDB
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to say 20 locations in Dallas, and
then pipe all the traffic back from
those edge computing sites to a
cloud core node in Austin, then
back out to the subscribers, you’ve
lost all advantage. The core net-
work functionality has to be close
or closer to the subscribers or you
lose all the advantages.”
Remella proposed that, in a de-
centralized network capable of
supporting huge bi-directional data
flows, a mobile edge compute node
“becomes a representation of the
core. The MEC node can actually
house the core. If the entire point of
5G is fatter pipes and lower latency,
Edge computing architecture
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you can’t travel 1,500 miles [to a cen-
tralized data center] even if it’s over
fiber and retain the low latency.”
The data velocity involved in ap-
plications enabled by standalone
5G, as well as the autonomous
manner of the delivery, creates the
need for a multi-faceted approach
to data handling. Remella said
VoltDB things about a fast cycle
and a slow cycle.
“When you look at a 1 millisecond
latency network, these things are
happening very fast,” he explained.
“When an event happens, the next
10 milliseconds are really, really
important for you and you need to
do a lot of comprehensive things in
that window to be able to monitor
or to be able to provide quality or
SLA assurance or detect and miti-
gate a threat.”
He described the slow cycle as
driving “automated intelligence.
As network events are happening,
you need to do the fast cycle and
siphon data into the slow cycle for
machine learning. The fast and
slow cycles need to play in tandem.
It’s not a client/server modality.
We’re seeing the confluence of a
database platform and streaming
platform coming together to solve
one complex problem.”
New slices, new services
The ability to deliver a net-
work slice is the long goal of the
transition to standalone 5G. At a
high-level, a network slice is an
end-to-end logical partition of a
network that provides specific
levels of service in an autonomous
fashion. This can take numerous
forms but the high-end vision
is an operator providing an en-
terprise its own slice capable of
flexibly delivering everything
from low-power sensor connec-
tivity to real-time data streaming
and analysis. The enterprise gets
everything it needs in terms of
connectivity and the operator
provides a differentiated service
in a manner that optimizes use of
network and spectral resources.
But, like most things in telecom, it
won’t happen overnight.
“It’s something that’s going to ma-
ture in steps,” Linder said, analogiz-
ing the process to painting traffic
demarcations on a road. “Perhaps
the first step is to get the white
paint on the sides so you get the
traffic on the road. The next step
is a little like putting the stripes in
the middle and putting in the lanes.
In an early form, Linder con-
sidered one slice comprising the
public network and a second slice
supporting private public safety
communications. “Then, as you
move further, we can discuss here
should the slices be based...on
use case or use case categories?”
Slices for fixed wireless access,
mobile broadband and the inter-
net of things, for example. “When
it’s very small, perhaps getting
to two [slices] is a step but when
you go beyond two to four or six,
what is the logical step for logical
“Activating network slicing in the core is just one step. The supporting features on the air interface, i.e., bandwidth parts, mixed numerologies, etc. have to be there as well.”
Andreas Roessler, Technology Manager, Rohde & Schwarz
F E A T U R E R E P O R T
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compartmentalization? I see it as
something that’s going to grow and
develop and gradually get refined.”
Roessler sees network slicing as
something an operator will offer
when there’s a need to “serve sig-
nificantly different QoS. Network
slices should be selected based on
the UE type and its requirements.
For example, a local utility pro-
vider deploying smart meters
has specific QoS requirements
that network slicing can address
also using a particular frequency
band...for extended coverage, and
uses advanced Rel-16 features
like 2-step RACH to allow quick
access to the network transmit-
ting small data packets. Applying
network slicing is just one step
to get the full benefits...Also the
correct features on the air inter-
face and the infrastructure need
to be implemented by chipset and
terminal vendors as well as infra-
structure providers.”
When considering network slic-
ing, Roessler said considerations
must extend beyond the core. It’s
“drive by software-defined ra-
dio trend as in 5G core network
elements are functions...that are
independent of hardware. Acti-
vating network slicing in the core
is just one step. The supporting
features on the air interface, i.e.,
bandwidth parts, mixed numerol-
ogies, etc. have to be there as well;
or a flexible infrastructure with
following the trend of mobile edge
computing, e.g. for lower latency
only a network slice is not suffi-
cient. We have to shorten the dis-
tance between client and server
to become faster.”
He also pointed out that increas-
ingly autonomous networks give
way to increasingly autonomous
test and measurement practices,
including network optimization,
quality benchmarking and service
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quality monitoring. “You can install
probes in a fleet of Uber cars, waste
trucks, or busses that collect net-
work data, evaluate the QoE of ap-
plications, and report the results to
a central entity. This is also called
‘autonomous benchmarking’ since
it is unsupervised and not linked
to a drive/walk test campaign. Op-
erators can quickly get details in
real-time (and offline for post-pro-
cessing in addition) about the qual-
ity that subscribers perceive in
their networks.”
Remella said that for industrial
and enterprise IoT-type implemen-
tation, “Standalone 5G is really key.
I think that’s where standalone
5G is really going to start shining.
When you look at today’s imple-
mentations, it’s a combination of
4G core...plus your [5G] hardware
radio infrastructure investment.
When you put these two things to-
gether, you still aren’t tapping into
5G specifically.”
The need for agile delivery of
network slices is necessary for
vertical digital transformation
“because you have rapid data gen-
eration and consumption.
Also in this process, you have
to bring more intelligence to the
edge to make a real-time control
loop for things like process auto-
mation and digital twins. This is
where your 5G is going to really
accelerate revenue.”
So what does it look like when all
these pieces--5G connectivity and
core alongside edge compute--are
put together and applied to a use
case that creates business value for
a user and revenue potential for a
service provider?
Conclusion
The transition from 4G to
non-standalone 5G, although ac-
celerated from a standards and de-
ployment perspective, was and still
is gradual. The same will be true for
the transition from non-standalone
to standalone 5G. And, in addition
to investments in a cloud-native
core, the full benefits of stand-
alone 5G also require concurrent
investment in virtualization and
cloudification beyond the core out
to radio sites and edge computing
nodes. How operators approach
this confluence of technologies and
the management of them will be in-
formed by assets on hand as well as
strategic market priorities. But for
5G to rise up and meet the goal of
enabling broad digital transforma-
tion of enterprise and industry, “Ev-
erything is related to the 5G core,”
Convertino said.
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UPCOMING 2020
EDITORIAL PROGRAMS INCLUDE:
SEPTEMBER 2020
Figuring out 5G NR: Covering indoors and outdoors with millimeter wave
Wi-Fi 6: State of the market
5G Test and Measurement: How will automation shape workforce trends?
OCTOBER 2020
Digital Industry Solutions (New Series) Asset Tracking – a roundup and review of all the connectivity technologies in play in the asset tracking space.
Understanding the role of microwave in 5G transportMaking Industry Smarter (series)
Healthcare – how the healthcare sector is being transformed by IoT and AI (sensors and analytics)
5G Test and Measurement: Optimizing the fiber validation process to drive network scale
NOVEMBER 2020
5G Inside: Things to know in indoor 5G network design
The benefits of bringing 5G NR into unlicensed spectrum
DECEMBER 2020
Wi-Fi, public 5G or private network: What’s an enterprise to do?
5G in 2021: Expectation vs. reality or Will 5G change the world?