Wireless, Wireline Companies Urged To Work More Closely To Meet 5G Future
DALLAS -- Wireline and wireless companies may need to cooperate in some instances to fully meet future customer demand for bandwidth and to keep a lid on capital expenditures as carriers look toward 5G, executives said on a panel on the first day of a Telecommunications Industry Association conference. ISPs may sometimes need to collocate equipment to gain more broadband efficiency while preventing capital expenditure costs from skyrocketing, representatives from Corning and other big and smaller companies said Monday at TIA 2016. Smart enhancement of broadband and other services also means adopting different approaches in different areas, they said.
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It's not cost effective to bring fiber to every rural home, so bringing fiber to the curb may make more sense, said executives. And they asked the audience to keep in mind that very few metropolitan areas are as dense as the central parts of the biggest U.S. cities. That means in the "middle places" -- not central areas of top cities nor rural locations -- a fixed-service and wireless approach is needed, said Tarana Vice President-Marketing Steven Glapa. "What about the rest of the country" other than the most-densely populated, largest cities, he asked? He said "tens of millions" of lines of copper are being "exhausted" because of demand for video.
There are "multiple operators in some markets providing fiber to the same home," such as AT&T, Comcast and Google, which has a fiber product, said Corning's Kevin Bourg, an optical network architect. "How do we converge what we call wireline and wireless networks?" Capex is a "key obstacle" to some further deployment, he and other speakers acknowledged. "But some of it has to do with operators being able to work with themselves," said Bourg.
Speakers used the example of having multiple pieces of wireless radio gear on each light or utility pole in a city, saying that's costly and not efficient. "We don’t want macrocells on every single light pole," said Bourg. "That would just be awkward and not really efficient for anyone." Instead, competitors will need to cooperate, the panelists agreed. Collocation sites need more integration, as not every carrier can have all its own equipment everywhere it wants, said speakers including Philip Herman, Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Co. vice president-green tower solutions. "Clearly, 5G is a good opportunity to do that."
One speaker had some praise for the FCC for its sharing approach in the 3.5 GHz band. Giving the commission a "shout-out" was Glapa. "Part of why the industry is looking so hard" at such spectrum is because other sub-10 GHz bands "look full," he said. Though 3.5 GHz may not be commercially usable in some geographic areas, "that leaves the whole rest of the United States" that could be served by such bands, he said. "We think about using the spectrum in a smarter radio kind of way."
Speakers also stressed a need to focus on indoor, not outdoor, mobile infrastructure. Some said most wireless device usage by consumers occurs inside buildings. Enhancing outdoor networks "isn’t really a solution to that problem," said Glapa. "What you need is better in-building backhaul."
High costs, thousands of dollars for mounting equipment on a single pole, require sharing infrastructure, said panelists including ZenFi CEO Ray LaChance. "Those costs are pretty significant, so we need to look at ways to drive costs" down, he said: Don’t "build networks the way that you used to." Create "shareable infrastructure" instead of "single-use solutions," said LaChance. "Pool this capital." Currently, resources are only "loosely shared," he said. "Ultimately, I think it’s going to move to a software-defined environment." Software-defined networks and network virtualization, in which carriers move away from expensive hardware to control their networks, will be discussed at TIA 2016 panels later this week.