5G NETWORKS
5G is officially live in major cities across the UK, including
London, Cardiff, Manchester and Glasgow – with widespread
coverage expected to accelerate through 2022. There’s
no doubt that 5G will revolutionise industries across the
country, not least because it offers significantly greater
capacity than 4G and speeds up to 100 times faster. For
businesses, it offers an attractive transport option for
software-defined WANs (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN is a virtual network architecture that provides
enterprises with the flexibility to leverage any combination
of transport services, including broadband to securely and
directly connect users to applications wherever they reside.
SD-WAN virtualises WAN services, including multiprotocol
label switching (MPLS), broadband and 4G/LTE, treating
them as a resource pool. Many enterprises turned to SD-
WAN as cloud computing became the norm, realising that
their conventional router centric network architectures were
unable to keep up.
To date, 4G has primarily been used as a backup to higher
bandwidth Internet connectivity because of its relatively
low capacity and high cost per bit. However, with 5G being
added to the portfolio of SD-WAN transport options, and
its ability to offer higher throughput rates, it will deliver a
unique combination of fast deployment, diverse connectivity
and high bandwidth that’s sure to accelerate the adoption
of broadband SD-WANs.
How 5G will benefit the enterprise
5G provides a flexible means of connecting branch offices
and remote workers. It can work with video and voice data,
as well as high-speed data transfer, such as large files,
particularly in video streaming. 5G can be used either as a
primary or secondary network transport to connect branch
and remote office users to critical business applications,
ensuring always-consistent, always-available application
performance – even in the event of an outage or degraded
service.
As a wireless technology, another benefit of 5G is that
organisations can gain access to Internet connectivity faster
than waiting for service providers to connect conventional
WAN transport services to their facilities. Time to connection
capability is greatly improved, not least because it can take
weeks or months to provision a fibre link, whereas 5G could
bring a new site online in a matter of days. That being said,
with the rollout of 5G still not being widespread, it will likely
be some time before this benefit is fully realised, as the 5G
connection will need to be live in certain locations. Once it is,
and since 5G is a wireless technology, all that’s required is a
suitable customer premise equipment device to terminate
the connection.
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Adding 5G to the transport mix
The initial success of 5G deployments will ultimately
demand an automated, self-driving WAN foundation with
underlay intelligence that delivers the highest quality of
experience for users, such as the one offered by SD-WAN.
Today’s enterprises need to shift to a network model that
eliminates endless hours of manual programming at the
device level and embraces automation to adapt applications
usage and performance needs of businesses, securely
serving teams and partners that are diverse in location,
function and needs.
Only the best in class SD-WAN solutions will enable
customers to incorporate 5G services into the WAN
transport mix. Indeed, all the capabilities of the SD-WAN
platform – including packet-based link bonding, dynamic
path control and path conditioning can be supported across
multiple transport links. Management software enables the
prioritisation of 5G bandwidth usage based on branch and
application requirements. This is ideal for retailers and their
point of sale transactions, plus any other deployments where
always-available WAN connectivity is critical for the business.
Managed SD-WAN services
Service providers have a vital and value-added role in the
design, installation, deployment, management and ongoing
monitoring of managed SD-WAN services – and this is
something that enterprises often don’t appreciate until
something goes awry. Indeed, service providers are already
taking advantage of the distinct benefits of SD-WAN to
offer managed SD-WAN services that leverage flexible and
mobile 4G LTE to their customers. However, with 5G now live
in major cities across the UK, this will serve to create new
revenue streams for 5G-enabled managed services.
For enterprises, they will not only benefit from a more
flexible means of connecting remote workers and branch
offices via 5G, but a managed SD-WAN service will provide
far better economics and capabilities than physical
connections.
A future with 5G
While 5G is poised to support new technologies, including
the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI),
robotics, connected cities and self-driving cars, it’s also
going to revolutionise the enterprise in terms of connecting
users to applications. Businesses will have high expectations
for 5G and its promise to deliver always-on, high-performing
network and applications. Critical to the success of 5G will
be an automated, self-driving network, and advanced SD-
WAN technology to benefit from the increased capacity and
speed on offer. n
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