CISCO’s Whitepaper Identifies Coverage Cost as Major Challenge to 5G Deployment, Suggests Agile Transport Infrastructure to Cushion Effect

Emma Okondji

As Nigeria refines its last-minute 5G deployment arrangements across the country, following the approval of the National Executive Council (NEC) to deploy 5G, Cisco, a world leader in technology that provides global Internet support, has identified a major challenge. in the implementation of 5G worldwide and proposed a key technological solution that will solve the problem and allow the smooth distribution of 5G around the world, including Nigeria.

Cisco identified the challenge in a document recently published by the Global Communications Systems Association (GSMA) with the Cisco Executive contribution that THISDAY received from the GSMA website.

Following NEC’s approval last month to introduce 5G in Nigeria, after successfully testing a 5G network on the MTN network in three major cities, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Dr. Isa Ibrahim Pantami said that the fifth generation (5G) network will will be deployed in Nigeria in January 2022, which he said will help monitor public assets against vandalism.

Pantami revealed this in Maiduguri at a town hall meeting to deal with the vandalism of the country’s electricity and telecommunications infrastructure.

In a similar development, the Executive Deputy Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Garba Danbata, also assured Nigerians of a plan to deploy a 5G network in Nigeria, which he said will improve the user experience and speed in network connectivity.

Danbatta reassured during the meeting in the second quarter of 2021 and the open forum of the Industrial Consumer Advisory Forum (ICAF), which took place in Lagos.

5G is currently being deployed worldwide with services that are typically introduced in urban areas and expand over time.

However, in a published document, Cisco said: “One of the major challenges in the coming years for the implementation of 5G will be to improve the coverage of 5G cost-effectively. The 5G radio access network (RAN) contributes significantly to the overall cost with a significant increase in the number of deployed cells and related equipment, as well as increased requirements for speed, reliability and latency performance.

“5G is designed from the ground up to support multiple services with a more flexible and flexible virtual network architecture. This requires an equally flexible and flexible transport infrastructure that can cost-effectively support both 5G and legacy mobile network services as well as other IP-based services. The transport infrastructure must be open to enable network sharing, automated to allow adaptation to changing service requirements and programmable to enable support for future requirements.

According to the document, Cisco Fronthaul packet routers enable the implementation of an end-to-end packet transport solution from a radio site on a mobile site to a mobile core that converges 4G and 5G mobile and fixed services. They provide the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to alternative transport solutions for RAN. In this way, Fronthaul 5G packet routers allow for a cost-effective expansion of converged services.

Product Engineering Manager, Cisco’s Large-Scale Infrastructure Group, Shahid Agimeri, one of the participants in the White Paper, said that 5G will introduce a number of improvements and innovations that affect RAN design.

Ajmeri went on to say that they include a new radio with higher speeds and capacity, along with a network breakdown and a software-centered approach that allows flexibility in the deployment of radio units (RUs), distributed units (DUs) and centralized units (CUs). ) as separate virtualized / container functions.

“Programmable software-defined network (SDN) controllers and control and

Network orchestration solutions (MANO) that can be used to effectively control these functions, along with convergence and automation, to convert all services into a common transport network and deploy them in the form of network slices, allowing continuous monitoring and provision of services.

“These transformations show the highly dynamic nature of 5G RAN, where predictable static network expansion planning is no longer an option. 5G RAN is automated, software programmable and constantly adapts in real time to the changing requirements for services and traffic flows that are constantly changing. This requires a flexible transport solution that can adapt to the dynamic traffic flows expected in a 5G RAN, while converging legacy RAN services into the same Fronthaul network, ”said other participants in the white paper.