5G NETWORKS
By Leo Craig, General Manager,
Riello UPS www.riello-ups.co.uk
IT administrators need to learn why
containerised micro data centres
will allow them to tap into the
potential of superfast 5G
We’ve recently seen Vodafone follow EE in dipping their
toes into the world of 5G, with the other major network
operators set to follow suit later this summer. To start with,
the superfast speeds associated with the fifth generation of
mobile communications will only be obtainable by people
lucky enough to live in one of
the select few towns and cities
where the service is available.
And then there’s the small
matter of having to shell out for
an expensive new 5G-enabled
phone too.
For the rest of us eager to
capitalise on a tech innovation
industry claims will completely
revolutionise our personal and
professional lives, we’ll have
to wait a little longer for mass
adoption. But surely the wait will be worth it in the end? And
I’m not just talking about being able to download an entire
film in a matter of seconds.
While we need to take any prediction of 20Gb/s with a
pinch of salt, most experts believe speeds of 10Gb/s – 100
times faster than standard 4G – will be achievable. This
opens up a whole host of possibilities: smart factories, virtual
and augmented reality, driverless cars, remote healthcare
for patients and much more. However, the transformative
future promised by 5G will rely on low latency and near-
instantaneous processing power; something which the
traditional data centre and the cloud struggle to deliver.
Sending packets of information generated by sensors in
our smart devices or from factories, offices and other places
of work all the way to a centralised location, processing it,
then ‘returning to sender’ for action simply doesn’t cut the
mustard. At present, with the most advanced 4G networks
there’s a latency of 40ms, while it’s 10-20 milliseconds even
with a fixed ‘superfast’ broadband connection.
Relying on connections to data centres that are often
hundreds or even thousands of miles away inevitably chokes
processing speeds further. In a world where even the tiniest
delay can disrupt the all-important end-user experience,
this is fast-becoming unacceptable. Transporting data in
such a way also eats up vast amounts of hugely expensive
bandwidth and provides cybercriminals and hackers with a
potentially lucrative stream of information to target.
It will take a different sort of processing to truly unlock
the full power of 5G. Instead of sending information
to and from data centres for processing, why not bring
the processing close to where the data originates from?
Fundamentally, that’s what edge processing is – the
installation of smaller ‘local’ data centres near the factory,
office block or heavily populated areas. Shifting from
‘data centres’ to ‘centres of data’ solves the conundrum
of latency by removing lengthy two-way data flows. With
the necessary supporting infrastructure at the edge, it’s
predicted 5G will deliver 1ms latency for mission-critical and
Internet of Things (IoT) applications, with 4ms the target for
mobile broadband.
www.networkseuropemagazine.com
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