There has been considerable buzz in the popular media in the recent past about telcos worldwide piloting 5G tech. And thanks to the unforgiving pandemic this year that saw countless people working from home, more people outside tech have began to appreciate the need for sustainable high speed networks to support their remote work.
Unlike previous network transitions where telcos retrofitted newer antennas to existing base stations and bought fancy new hardware from the vendors, 5G evolution will take a different path. Interestingly, 5G transfers more power to the telco operators from the network equipment providers who were previously working independently in siloes, leaving integration and mangeability woes to the telco. 5G will be enabled by Network Function Virtualization(NFV) in which Network functions(NFs) such as switching, routing, firewalling etc. that used to be implemented in custom hardware, will now be running as regular containerized applications on COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware that telcos typically run their enterprise applications on. This move from hardware to software allows telcos to avoid vendor lockin as they now have the liberty to buy software NFs from any vendor and stitch them together. More importantly though, telcos will now have the flexibility of using the same underlying hardware for both telco NFs and enterprise apps, dynamically scaling out/in the number of instances of each app based on the incoming load for each individual app. This fine grained control over their infrastructure is something telcos have long desired and finally within their reach. Obviously, with more powers comes more responsibility in terms of managing performance and reliability (which we will see in a separate post).
But for now, telcos have a lot more flexibility compared to the days they were hauling in huge hardware boxes into their datacenter, that were literally a black box to them.