With the current year promising to be a breakout one for 5G, I’ve taken the opportunity to outline some of the key changes I see coming in the Telco & Edge Cloud area as a result of this arrival.
- We will see robust, nationwide 5G networks and services in the US beginning in the latter half of 2020.
- The growing popularity of eSim technology will chip away at the traditional barriers to multi-carrier solutions and dynamic carrier switching, making both much more feasible and popular.
- The primary driver of consumer 5G usage will be the growing adoption of credible enterprise 5G use cases such as advanced conferencing and private network connectivity.
- 5G connectivity will emerge as a credible replacement for WiFi. For the majority of us who are accustomed to always asking ‘What’s the WiFi password?’, this will be a liberating sea-change.
- Tier 1 telcos will get comfortable with a ‘virtual-first’ architecture for their core network functions, turning their attention to the Edge and RAN.
- The battle for the Edge among telcos and public cloud providers will heat up significantly. Hybrid architectures that connect telco clouds to hyperscale public clouds will gain traction.
- We will see the emergence of edge-native applications spread across two categories: latency sensitive and high data volume. By the end of 2020, latency-sensitive apps will lead in edge deployments.
- Radio (RAN) infrastructure will see significant software-driven upheaval due to the disaggregation and separation of radio, distribution, and control.
- Increased IoT device-based cyberattacks will compel CIOs to assert more control over IoT deployments. Security will become an inherent requirement of the 5G infrastructure supporting IoT.
- The adoption of programmable network architectures will increase among global carriers, enabling strong policy-based security solutions.
