Across the globe, 5G has taken off. According to ‘The Connectivity Index’ issued by Carphone Warehouse in 2021, the UAE ranked first amongst the Arab countries and the third globally in launching and deploying 5G networks. Since then, the UAE has fully embraced 5G to digitally revolutionise vertical industries, increase efficiency, and create new opportunities.
As the pace of 5G deployment accelerates, operators are beginning to transition to cloud-native architectures in order to meet the needs of their customers, a move that brings with it significant complexity. Kubernetes architectures, mandatory encryption, 5G standalone (SA), edge computing, and network slicing are just a few of the areas posing challenges to the industry.
It is therefore critical for operators to incorporate observability and security into their solutions from the outset in order to facilitate the rapid deployment of new and profitable services, while also ensuring the very best customer and enterprise experience. This requires measuring end-to-end performance from the application to the network level.
Ensuring a secure and stable 5G environment will be instrumental in establishing a strong foundation for future innovation. Although still in its infancy, the next generation of 5G mobile communications is already being developed, paving the way for 6G and expanding wireless connectivity to practically every facet of human and machine interaction. However, the transition from 5G to 6G will be exceedingly challenging, making it essential to implement a solid foundation for a successful deployment.
5G Advanced: The Road To 6G
5G Advanced networks are predicted to be deployed in the next three to five years. Once available, they will likely play a significant role in enabling greater wireless capabilities that will expand connectivity and introduce a range of innovative, game-changing services for enterprise customers.
This advanced version of 5G will improve fundamental radio and system performance while expanding mobile broadband to new types of devices that will enable significant use cases. Moreover, incorporating additional intelligence into the network with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) will enable 5G Advanced to rapidly adapt to its environment, support immersive extended reality (XR), edge computing applications, holographic communications, and exciting new IoT technologies across a range of applications. These will be seen across various industries including smarter manufacturing, farming, and health-related services, to name a few.
All of this investment will be critical for progressing to 6G in the coming decade. To overcome key technical challenges, we can also expect additional standards and protocols to be introduced, and extensive planning will be required to keep up with rigorous end-to-end latency, jitter, and synchronisation requirements of a wide range of potential use cases. The possibilities are exciting if fully realised – from remote medicine and telesurgery, mixed reality, five-sense networks with fully tactile haptics for immersive gaming, to custom microservices, autonomous transportation, time-engineered services, smart factories, and even smarter cities.
To achieve this, 6G will need to deliver high data rates and low latency while also meeting strong bidirectional dependability requirements across many devices with near-zero response times.
Assuring the Next Generation of Services
A high degree of automation will be essential to assuring the next generation of wireless services – from misconfiguration troubleshooting to cybersecurity. Cloud-based AI tools will also enable operators to better comprehend the root causes of problems, hence supporting teams in preventing the proliferation of these issues.
Additionally, operators will need to assure service for next-generation networks in order to support service-level agreements (SLAs), mission- and business-critical services, as well as developing applications. Future 6G network complexity and service assurance requirements will certainly demand enhanced AI-powered automation, otherwise subpar customer experience can be expected.
To deliver truly actionable insights into the dependability and latency of tomorrow’s 6G networks, apps, and services, highly scalable cloud-based monitoring systems are needed. As such, it is critical to future-proof your networks now.
