5G Transport Network Requirement for Indian Telecom By Subrata Sen
5G Transport Network Requirement for Indian Telecom By Subrata Sen
There are few people whom we meet and connect instantly. Recently, We met Subrata Sen, (Head, Fiber/Transport Planning at Bharti Infratel Ltd) and veteran in telecom industry during a conference, we found resonance immediately. During our conversation, we had long discussions about upcoming technologies and how important the backhaul, especially fiber is for future networks.
For example, if we wish to move our telco infrastructure to Cloud, virtualize our network elements, do we have the capability to move all data traffic to the centralized cloud? Mr. Sen provided his expert opinion on how the transport network needs to be redesigned and what are important parameters for the same.
He has been kind enough to share a slide deck with his thoughts and findings on the” 5G Transport Requirement for Indian Telecom”, in which he clearly shows the evolution of Networks and need of fibre backhaul. In his words
Unlike before when transport use to follow the network, time has come when network will follow transport.
Summary:
Moving toward 5G, the virtual reality era, the network capacity increases many folds as a whole, so is the requirement on the backhaul/ transmission capacity increases.
5G Network requires:
- Ultra-high reliability
- Extreme broadband
- Low latency
- 5G base stations are TDD, collaboration within and outside base station requires higher clock synchronization precision
Traditional network architecture would not be able to sustain and take the load. Network slicing is the future and would fulfill the SLA’s and QoS requirements of various use cases, services and customers.
With Evolution of Network and technologies the transport network is evolving too, access sites today has 1 to 10 Gigabits of backhaul pipe which is considered to increase to 40Gigabit per access site.
Are we Ready for 5G?
In the country such as India, where only 20% of the sites are connected with fiber backhaul. 5G seems to be on the way, but are we and our network ready for the next generation?