InBroadcast
There is no doubt that 5G is under the spotlight now and the world’s tier-one operators are leading the race with large-scale field trials and aggressive commercial deployment progress. Operators’ decisions on when, where and how to deploy 5G are not only driven by the availability of spectrum, but also application scenarios, site solutions and business models.
In APAC, arguably the world’s most diverse telco region, operators are encountering all of these issues. World leaders in the move towards 5G and next generation fibre networks, such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, are neighbours (in the context of the massive APAC geography) of the poorest and least developed countries such as North Korea and Afghanistan.
In terms of pure speed, Singapore vies with Iceland as the world’s trail blazer. Singapore ranked fourth (behind Norway, Iceland and Qatar) with the fastest mean download speeds over mobile in the 12 months from December 2017 – November 2018 at (54.71 Mbps) according to Ookla’ Speedtest. The nation-state trumped all others in recording mean download speeds over fixed broadband of 175.13 Mbps. Next fastest were Iceland (153.03 Mbps), Hong Kong (138.31 Mbps) and South Korea (114.67 Mbps).
At the other end of the spectrum markets such as China, Indonesia and Myanmar have seen their previously strong growth stagnate due to the challenges of connecting those still unconnected, particularly poorer and rural communities. The digital divide is greatest in markets such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where 70–80 percent of the population are not yet online.
This does, however, leave room for growth; penetration levels across South Asia will rise from the 50 percent average to 61 percent by 2025, according to mobile operator’s body GSMA. By end of this year, mobile broadband will account for 93 percent of total connections across the region, with 2G all but obsolete in over half of APAC markets.
Asia continues to be the dominant player globally in the fibre broadband market too, with ResearchandMarkets.com identifying South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, as world leaders in this regard.
Intense competition, a techno-literate culture and favourable regulatory environments have helped drive a rapid migration to fast mobile and fixed broadband networks over recent years but facing rising customer expectations in saturated markets, operators are now looking to pioneer services in the gigabit era.
East Asia, for instance, is home to some of the most penetrated mobile markets in the world (such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea), with minimal opportunity for further subscriber growth, [per GSMA]. On average across East Asia, 81% of the population subscribe to mobile services; this will increase by just three percentage points between 2017 and 2025.
To reach the ‘Gigatopia’, as coined by Korea Telecom’s Jeong Hyeong Lee, operators must rollout an intelligent network based on Gigaspeed internet, GigaWi-Fi and 5G. China Telecom, for example, which has 255 million mobile and 135 million fixed broadband customers, expects the volume of data traffic on its network to grow eleven-fold between 2018 and 2025 as a growing number of customers use 4G and ultimately 5G mobile broadband services and FTTH uptake grows.
For many operators the rollout of 5G cannot come a moment too soon. The promise of network slicing, which creates multiple logical partitions within resource allocations are designed to address specific use cases ranging from self-driving cars to IoT devices.
The Asia Pacific as a whole is on track to become the world’s largest 5G region by 2025, led by Japan and South Korea (with Australia and China not far behind), according to the GSMA’s latest report.
The first 5G launches in South Korea, Japan and Singapore are expected to focus on enhanced mobile broadband services, supplementing the capacity and capabilities of existing networks, particularly in dense urban areas. However, 5G’s next phase will lay the foundation to support a range of future use cases and innovations, including massive connectivity and low-latency services such as critical communication services (e.g. remote surgery, smart grids) and virtual reality.
“This is the ground floor of 5G,” noted Pete Lau, CEO of Chinese handset brand OnePlus at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this spring. “The first phase will be characterised by an evident increase in speed and new cloud functionality. 2021 to 2025 will see 5G, Cloud and AI enabling a whole new level of smart functionality in our lives. Then from 2025-2030 the age of internet of things will be unleashed.”
Next summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be a showcase for 5G technologies including for use in multi-camera video contribution links and 8K virtual reality – planned as live streamed by telco NTT Docomo.
The International Olympic committee has partnered with Alibaba to envelop the Tokyo’s games venues Alibaba’s cloud. “This will transform the Olympics for fans, venues and athletes,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.
There is wide industry consensus that the biggest piece of the 5G pie will not be consumer but in industrial and enterprise applications like mining, private healthcare or the military: those with the cash to spare for the premium of millisecond precision engineering and tailored algorithms.
“For us, the 5G business case stacks up,” Andy Penn, CEO at Telstra said at MWC2019. “It makes more sense for me to invest in 5G for the enterprise. Those use cases are starting to become clearer but how we package the solution for customers is a trickier issue.”
While the conversation tends to focus on 5G, the near-realisation of this long anticipated network upgrade hasn’t come alone. It is the combination of 5G with AI, Cloud and the IoT which have all come to maturity at the same time which isbehind a new wave of computing. In different combinations this will unleash incredible compute power in our personal devices and unlock patterns in data that humans just can’t see. Together these technologies will transform how we live, work and play. The GSMA characterises this as the era of Intelligent Connectivity.
Scaling for IoT
Already the world’s largest IoT market, APAC is expected to account for 11 billion connections and $386 billion in revenue by 2025, according to GSMA Intelligence. Mobile operators SingTel, M1, Maxis, Optus and Celcom together with consultants, manufacturers and systems integrators from across Asia have joined the GSMA’s IoT Programme.
“This programme will support the development of the IoT by creating a cross-regional community to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing,” explains Julian Gorman, Head of APAC, GSMA.
The Labs will be available to partners in markets including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
“The aim is to accelerate the deployment of innovative IoT use cases that will improve the lives of over 3 billion people across the Asia Pacific region,” adds Gorman.
For example, in Sri Lanka, Dialog Axiata has a commercial mobile IoT network, supporting LTE and NB-IoT (NarrowBand) technologies, in partnership with Ericsson. It also partnered with Orange Electric, a manufacturer of electrical and lighting products in Sri Lanka, to launch the Orange Electric Smart Socket for the connected home market.
As M2M communication helps optimise and automate everything from urban planning to critical weather warnings, telcos are arguably in prime position to unlock growth from this emerging technology. For example, more than 500 cities in China are using Huawei’s NB-IoT network gear in smart city deployments. Chinese city Yingtan is saving 2 million tonnes of water a year after deploying 2 million smart water meters to reduce leakage.
Automated networks
The billions of internet connections predicted by the mid-2020’s should translate to enormous profits for carriers, but with the downward pressure on revenues globally, these profits will only be recognized by operators that learn to run their business more efficiently. Trying to manage that number of connections manually is costly, and operators who fall behind in automation will see all their profits consumed by higher OPEX costs.
The cost of rolling out and implementing 5G across all sectors of the economy globally is expected to reach at least $2.7 trillion by the end of 2020, according to research from finance house Greensill.
Huawei alone has invested more than $15 billion in technology and claims, with some justification to be the first company able to deploy 5G networks at scale, to deliver 14Gbps per 5G sector and boost 5G speeds using fibre up to 200Gbps - four times greater than any competitor.
“While the industry’s networks are 21st century, the network operation and maintenance is still in the 18th century,” said Chairman Guo Ping. “Globally, 70% of network faults are from human limitations.”
AI has the potential to change this and create autonomous networks that are responsive, self-healing and self-optimizing. Huawei is using AI embedded in its chips to build intelligent networks that would, among other things, reduce network issues and reduce power costs for carriers.
Increased complexity in networking and the need to scale is driving the need for increased network automation and agility. “It’s not just about putting 200-400G into the network but about the programmability of the network,” says Bob Everson, Cisco’s Global Director of Mobility. “In particular, the use of machine learning to make things like network management a bit easier. We’re a long way from self-healing networks but that is the ultimate plan which is why the focus for much of the optical industry is on software.”
E-commerce operator Rakuten plans to roll out Japan’s first new mobile network in a decade and will do using greenfield technology that it claims will see it leapfrog rivals. Its radio access will be completely virtualised and running as VNF (virtual network functions) on a private cloud enables Rakuten to deploy new services rapidly.
“We aim to not only disrupt Japan’s telco industry, we want to revolutionise mobile networks worldwide,” CTO Tareq Amin said.
Government regulation
The impact of government regulation on driving internet equality and giga-speed connectivity is critical. Some recognise superfast broadband is a pre-requisite to entering the fourth industrial revolution.
Australia’s attempt to expand fibre rollout and increase and usage speed appear to be working, according to recent reports.
“We’re now seeing benefit that high speed broadband brings to everyone in Australia,” says JB Rousselot, chief strategy officer at NBN, the public body tasked with driving the initiative. “We started roll out in rural areas and we’ve recently seen the tangible economic benefits that this brings to connecting the whole of the country not just dense urban areas.”
NBN predict that its broadband infrastructure deployment by 2021 will have added AUS$10.4 billion (US$7.36 bn) to the economy and 31,000 jobs. Other indicators in its Connecting Australia 2018 report show that video streaming isdriving data consumption, with the average home user now consuming 213 GB per month. It has connected 4.4m customers to the network and is on track, it says, to reach 8 million by 2020.
This approach still pales besides that of New Zealand where fibre connectivity reaches 70 percent of the population with a target of 87 percent attainable by 2022. Speeds range from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.
Kate McKenzie, CEO at communications infrastructure provider Chorus says there are global lessons to be learned from the open access, wholesale only, shared infrastructure model employed in New Zealand. “This has meant investing once in the national infrastructure, without wasteful duplication, allowing us to deliver congestion free fibre to the home to nearly 90% of the population,” she says.
Spark, the former encumbent and one-time parent of Chorus scooped Sky NZ to rights to this summer’s Rugby World Cup (the sport is virtually a religion in NZ as McKenzie points out), with most matches available for streaming only. She says it will be a major test of Chorus’ ability to deliver concurrent HD streams at peak to a huge national audience exclusively over broadband.
“Culture is more important than strategy for rollout,” argues McKenzie. “If you aren’t customer focussed and you are change resistant then it will be really tough to make next-gen models sustainable. It’s also good to have a bit of competition in the market to keep you on your toes.”
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