Automating to Address India’s Varied 5G needs

5G is poised to boost the adoption of other digital technologies and improve everything from financial services, education, to retail

With 5G auctions recently concluded, India is all set to witness the launch of commercial 5G services later this year. There is a general consensus that 5G is likely to have a transformative impact with India’s telecom regulator highlighting that it can potentially contribute as much as $1 trillion rupees to the economy by 2035.

Even so, the reality is that the adoption of 5G will be different in different parts of the country. Depending on the available use cases in each market, every mobile and wholesale network operator will decide on their 5G investment based on their business objectives, maturity of available infrastructure, and application spaces.

Against this backdrop, how can service providers (SPs) maintain a business edge while ensuring consistent performance and user experience across India?

Meeting the needs of a Digital India

Beyond faster internet connections for consumers, 5G is also poised to boost the adoption of other digital technologies and improve everything from financial services, education, to retail. This is especially relevant in India, providing the opportunity to extend financial services and education coverage in remote and yet-to-be-connected areas.

However, the growth of 5G, higher-speed broadband adoption, and enterprise requirements for cloud services are pushing SPs and content providers to build and scale their network closer to their customers. As the network edge rapidly evolves, having an efficient metro network architecture to meet city-wide connectivity demands—while maintaining scalable operations is critical.

Automated processes are going to be vital in ensuring that operational processes work together without a glitch. In addition, several models of working together will evolve as 5G matures and its infrastructure needs to be agile and flexible enough to enable innovation in business models.

That’s where new coherent routing platforms that provide improvements in power, cooling, and transport operational efficiency, can become game-changers. These platforms enter at a time when there is growing appetite for broadband initiatives that will drive aggressive passive optical network (PON) deployments and increase demand for aggregation of network traffic at the edge. SPs want adaptable routing platforms that will simplify operations, reduce costs, and eliminate the need for manual technician intervention.

Manual provisioning and management no longer possible

In a 5G world, relying on manual provisioning and management processes is simply not sustainable. It is important to note that many core assurance requirements are not changing. SPs still need to collect, correlate, and visualize network events – performance metrics, faults, and alarms, for example – and fix problems manually. However, to build effective 5G networks, SPs now need to do it at a massive scale.

To resolve this challenge, SPs need an additional level of intelligent automation that can only be provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate the trouble-shooting process, to deliver the cloud-like network experiences customers want. This can help SPs identify problems before they affect customers and lower operational costs in the long run.

Further, intelligent automation also enables network slicing, a key feature of 5G. Network slicing enables service providers to use the same physical infrastructure to deliver dynamic services with different speeds, availability, and speed requirements.

Automation is essential for every stage of the service lifecycle because thousands of dynamic network slices will need to be provisioned in real-time across physical, virtual, and cloud-based domains. All this will lead to network complexity, which cannot be addressed with legacy infrastructure and manual processes. SPs will need to incorporate intelligent automation in service assurance to introduce new capabilities quickly.

Collaborating to build an ecosystem

A 5G ecosystem will involve hyperscale cloud operators, system integration partners, content providers, and software vendors. While SPs bring in fixed and wireless network infrastructure; the cloud infrastructure comes from hyperscalers; and system integrators ensure that all the hardware and software systems work seamlessly together.

As India moves closer to the launch of 5G services later this year, there is a need to bring all these stakeholders on a common platform to leverage the 5G opportunity. Automated processes are going to be vital in ensuring that operational processes work together without a glitch. In addition, several models of working together will evolve as 5G matures and its infrastructure needs to be agile and flexible enough to enable innovation in business models.

2022 will be fundamental for 5G in India and will set the tone in building a dynamic 5G ecosystem. SPs will need to leverage intelligent automation in all aspects of the network, from network planning to implementation and monetization, to deliver on the promise of 5G. SPs are not alone. There is an ecosystem of partners that can share expertise, knowledge and experience to ensure SPs are able to compete and win in India’s 5G race.

By Kailem Anderson

VP, Portfolio & Engineering, Blue Planet.

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