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CONNEC T I V I T Y
5g and
fibre
5G is being rolled out across South Africa, bringing with it the promise of super-fast, low-latency, wireless internet connectivity. But does this mean fibre will become redundant? By ANTHONY SHARPE
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ot at all, is the answer from Zoltan Miklos, general manager of network planning at MTN South Africa. “When people talk about 5G, they often approach it from a radio perspective,” says Miklos, “but 5G is really an end-to-end architecture. You need to make sure the various building blocks of the network support 5G and its use cases. The radio base station elements, radio spectrum, high-capacity backhaul to the core network, the core network and supporting systems are all critical for 5G.” Miklos says the main metros will use fibre predominantly to support 5G deployments, because this is where infrastructural development has been concentrated. Where fibre is not available, high-capacity microwave links are used, which can support bandwidths in excess of 1Gbit per second. “Ideally, you need 10Gbit per second connectivity to a 5G-enabled mobile base station site, which fibre enables.” Further enabling 5G and the required national network capacity is fibre technology called dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), which allows data signals from a variety of sources to share a single optical fibre. “DWDM is used in the national optical transport network, which interconnects our core sites,” explains Miklos. “This high-availability core carries mobile, enterprise and wholesale traffic.”
The business case The interplay between fibre and 5G is a complex one, both on a technical and business level. “Fibre won’t be deployed everywhere in South Africa, especially to the end user,” says Miklos. “The business case is difficult: low user density scenarios and high cost structures don’t allow for it to be deployed in some areas. There are long-haul fibre routes outside the metros that connect remote locations. But for clusters that are far from fibre infrastructure, long-haul microwave systems using multiple hops are required to provide high-bandwidth connectivity to these clusters.” Key to deployment considerations, says Miklos, is the fact that capacity requirements vary between rural low-density areas and urban areas. “Ideally, if the capacity requirements grow over time, fibre will be planned to those locations.” While fibre deployment is much more widespread in urban areas, it still requires capital investment prioritised by required bandwidth and the density of that demand. In some situations, 4G and 5G provide an opportunity to service fixed connectivity requirements. “It is optimal to deploy fibre as deep as possible, then have a wireless tail,” says Miklos. “A smart capital approach we follow is once there is sufficient densification of demand, then you extend the fibre network to the user to augment the wireless infrastructure.”
SD-WAN: a paradigm shift for network management
M
odern businesses find themselves juggling sprawling, complex, diverse systems and applications, making reliable, comprehensive network management crucial. Softwaredefined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) presents a centralised solution for network management with the potential to greatly simplify the process. “A key benefit of SD-WAN is predictability,” says Julian Liebenberg, chief of converged communications at BCX. “In the previous dispensation, it was possible to configure two devices on a network in such a way that they could not establish communication with each other. Now this is impossible: you’re using a centralised controller to establish connectivity between these devices, so by default your devices can communicate.” Liebenberg says this represents a paradigm shift in terms of network management: you don’t need someone to configure the network, because it configures itself. What this means is that network management becomes more of a business than a technical case. “The network becomes part of your intelligence. It collects information about business transactions. You start to think about how to get more out of the network. Your applications can learn from it: perhaps sales of a product line are picking up in a given branch, so your application needs to behave in a different way. This provides far more real-time data than looking at month-end reports, but only if someone takes the time to program the network to give those values.” ›
TECHNOLOGY
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2020/10/27 11:53 AM
