For more discussions and topics around SP Mobility, please visit our Mobility Community: http://cisco.com/go/mobilitycommunity For full blog post: https://communities.cisco.com/community/solutions/sp/mobility/blog/2014/03/31/forget-5g-for-now-lte-still-has-a-long-ways-to-go

1. Forget 5G for Now, LTE Still Has a Long Ways to Go
Posted by Chris Nicoll
It has been over four years since Telia Sonera Sweden and Finland launched the
world’s first commercial LTE networks and ushered in the age of true mobile broadband
services. By the end of 2014 we expect there to be nearly 300 LTE networks serving
upwards of 300 million users, with nearly 1,400 different devices connecting at speed up
to 300Mbps. Users from the GSM and CDMA worlds have to think the pinnacle has
been reached, but far from it. LTE is just beginning to get its legs.
Advances such as VoLTE and LTE-A will expand beyond South Korea into the US, UK,
Japan in 2014; and we have yet to see the impact of 40MHz channels, let alone
100MHz channels, which will usher in the Gigabit age for mobile networking. LTE still
has far to go to reach its full potential, in particular in areas such as SDN/NFV/Cloud
architecture and Small Cells, and I fully expect standards bodies, MNO’s and equipment
vendors to draw from the experience of LTE in these two key areas as 5G standards
shape up.
Virtualization of LTE infrastructure holds promise, but faces significant
challenges.
The mobile network infrastructure is roughly a USD50B market globally in 2014
according to our estimates of RAN and core investments across all network
technologies. A growing trend among the infrastructure vendors is to cannibalize their
own hardware-based revenues streams to take advantage of the growing enterprise
push towards software defined networking (SDN), virtualization (NFV) and Cloud
architecture. The major network equipment vendors have already been discussing their
solutions in these areas. These solutions are intended to lower mobile network solution
costs through the use of simpler, commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) hardware running
virtualized functions in both distributed and centralized architectures depending on the
needs of the operator.
Every major MNO I spoke with this year at both our Singapore Research event in
January 2014, and at MWC 2014 expressed interest in these new architectures to help
reduce Capex and Opex costs, deal with network scale, and simplify network
operations. However, these MNO CTO’s have also expressed a uniquely similar set of
concerns regarding Cloud-enabled/Virtualized network solutions:
o What is the reliability of the virtualized solutions? One comment from the
CTO at a multi-national MNO underscores a general concern: ‘some of the LTE
core systems today are not at five nines reliability. How do they expect systems
running on IT hardware to be five nines reliable?’

2. o How do I troubleshoot virtualized systems? With network functions such as
MME, BBU and the packet core running on COTS hardware, how do I pinpoint
and remedy problems quickly and effectively? How do I isolate the network from
rogue processes to minimize impact on my subscribers?
o Will the systems scale as expected? A number of CTO and network heads
mentioned the early network failures at DoCoMo and Verizon as software issues
not hardware failures and questioned whether or not the virtualized functions
could handle the network loads.
Cloud RAN was also a key area of interest, but responses from a selected set of MNO’s
revealed the fibre-rich requirements of Cloud RAN may limit its use in 4G network to
somewhere between ‘0% and 1%’ of sites according to one European MNO CTO, with
the high estimate being 5% of sites. Fibre-dense locations such as Seoul, South Korea;
Hong Kong; Singapore and certain major cities around the world may find a home for
Cloud RAN, but the fibre requirements may prove a hindrance to wider deployment.
MNOs technical leadership has clearly given the trends towards cloud and virtualization
significant mind-share and we are seeing some tests, trials and commercial
deployments of limited functions, for now. The challenge for the vendors is sharpening
the deployment opportunities for Cloud RAN, and addressing the Telco-grade concerns
regarding the virtualized functions. The good news is that the CTO’s I spoke with see
virtualization as a 10 year project, so lots of time for the vendors to address their
concerns.
Small Cells for LTE will undergo an extended development cycle.
Small Cells continue to solve key coverage problems for the MNO’s in both 2G and 3G
networks. The expected market growth is in additional 3G expansion and especially in
4G networks providing capacity and coverage to the macro network and solving the
increasing problem of indoor coverage for higher order (>2 GHz) 4G networks. The
Small Cell Forum continues an impressive march towards market development with the
release at MWC of its Urban Foundations release helping operators address Small Cell
deployment in dense urban centres.
I expect that in 2014 operators will be moving to broaden their small cell installation
activities, particularly in the dense urban areas where most of the high-use clients tend
to congregate. However a number of operators have also indicated a need for multi-
band small cell systems supporting up to five bands, which are not yet on the
market. Vendors have dual-band small cells either released or in testing but the bulk of
the market seems to be waiting for the more capable systems.
As more operators turn towards LTE-A and carrier aggregation to combine multiple
spectrum positions (28% of MNO’s have 3 or more spectrum bands according to the
Analysys Mason Spectrum Auction Tracker) the need for the small cell to match or

3. exceed the macro cell for band support grows. We look for a wave of multiband small
cells to be launched by the end of this year for installation beginning in late 2015.
5G and LTE: Friends, or Frenemies?
In the past four months I have seen six different vendor presentations of what is needed
in the 5G standard and I’ve discussed with four major MNO’s their views on what issues
5G should address. So I’m describing the current 5G development status as this: we
are at the ‘Wish List’ phase. The numbers mentioned are impressive: 1000x data
volume, Gigabit data rates, 99% reliability, 100% coverage, 1ms latency. The feature list
is even more impressive. Pretty much everything is on the table, and I’ll go into this in
more detail in another post.
For now, MNO’s and enterprises should be looking at the near future, the next 3-5
years, with a view towards how can multi-megabit mobile services change how the offer
and how they do business? If the old brick and mortar retail establishments are under
fire from internet-based firms, what about other businesses as well? If I can get the
performance of my fixed office and provide tools for even better coordination and
interworking for individuals and teams of people wherever they are, what does that do
for my business?
About the Author
Follow Chris Nicoll on Twitter @Canicoll
For more discussions and topics around SP Mobility, please visit our Mobility Community:
http://cisco.com/go/mobilitycommunity