In early 2018, CommScope executives argued that the Internet of Things, which Gartner expected to link about 20 billion devices worldwide by 2020, would push operators towards much larger fibre networks. They said 5G radio networks and IoT together would need high-capacity, low-latency transport that only optical fibre could provide.
The 20 billion devices forecast
The figure came from Gartner. Its forecast had moved over the years. In 2015 it projected 25 billion connected things by 2020 in one release, and 20.8 billion in another report of the period. In February 2017 it said 8.4 billion things would be in use that year, rising to 20.4 billion by 2020. Gartner counted dedicated-function objects and excluded smartphones and PCs. It also said consumers were the largest user segment, while businesses spent more per device.
Fibre as the backbone
CommScope said one goal of 5G was roughly 1,000 times the bandwidth of 4G in a given area, with cell sites about five times as dense. It said the industry consensus was to use fibre for backhaul and fronthaul wherever possible. Backhaul links base stations to the wired core. Fronthaul links remote radio heads at the cell site to the control network.
Pat Thompson, CommScope’s vice president of solutions for central office and headend, said in 2018 that both 5G and IoT needed far more fibre than networks then had, and that an optical network had to carry the traffic.
Edge data centres
David Tanis, CommScope’s director of strategic enterprise marketing, argued that IoT data had to be processed in real time, which pointed to edge data centres. IDC defined edge computing as a mesh of micro data centres of under 100 square feet that process or store critical data locally and pass the rest to a central site. IDC research manager Kelly Quinn expected mobile operators to add micro data centres next to or inside 5G towers. Businesses would rent space in them and link back to a cloud provider or central data centre.
CommScope also pointed to denser antennas, small cells, MIMO and sector splitting as ways to bring capacity closer to users.
Convergence and the central office
Ray Butler, CommScope’s vice president of wireless network engineering, described network convergence as delivering residential, business and wireless services over one fibre network. He saw interest in sites that support both fixed wireless and mobility. He also saw capex and opex savings in centralised and cloud RAN with network function virtualisation, where baseband functions move onto commercial servers.
CommScope said operators were rearchitecting central offices as edge data centres, because that is where access fibre terminates. It cited the Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter (CORD) model, which uses a virtualised infrastructure to deliver services to residential, enterprise and mobile customers.
CommScope’s conclusion in 2018 was that 5G and IoT would need new and extensive fibre networks.