21712 - SCTE Broadband Nov2022 COMPLETE v1

58 Vol. 44 No. 4 - November 2022 Issue Executive Guide to 5G Radio Access Network Rollout (RAN): Methods and Operational Procedures. by VIAVI Solutions 3 Simple Steps De-risk your deployments If you asked five people what they thought the promise of 5G was going to deliver, you’d hear at least as many answers. As someone working in mobile telecoms, you’d do better than most. It’s not a new symbol in the top corner of a shiny new handset representing Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), which most of us understand and expect. It’s actually all about: n The Internet of Things n Massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) n Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) All this new complexity comes with risk, not just benefit. It is not only about opportunity and new ways to monetise your networks. Operators have been focused on speed of rollout – i.e., densification, trying to win the coverage competition but not considering optimisation and troubleshooting. After some years of pushing ahead with the network expansion now is the time to de-risk the deployments and concentrate on better verification. Don’t delay, test today 5G deployment is not a simple radio upgrade, but a complete change of topology. It demands major changes across the network to support 5G Standalone (SA) and cloud networks, to enable a myriad of new 5G services, many of them yet to be imagined. Take as examples, mission-critical applications such as remote surgery, or fully self-driving cars; these “verticals” will place an ever-increasing load on underlying networks and will be more demanding than mobile video streaming and mobile data from the 4G and 3G eras. If you’re a mobile network operator in an excruciatingly competitive environment, and you’re bidding to build a large private network for a gigafactory or a vast container-port, you wouldn’t want to deploy an underpinning network that had not been adequately stress-tested. You would be very keen to understand the new methods of operating procedures (MOPs) to confirm that your colleagues were assuring all aspects of the network build-out and turn-up were being done correctly. Test 5G smarter Complexity abounds! For example, 5G relies on higher spectrum frequencies, mid-band: 1-6GHz (CBRS and C-Band) and high-bands: > 24GHz (mm-wave) for its greater speed and capacity, but that increases cell density. New massive MIMO antenna beam forming enables that extra capacity, sending multiple data streams, one per UE, using the same time-frequency resources. technical A Giant Leap for 5G