It is a capital
improvement project the size of the entire planet, replacing one wireless
architecture created this century with another one that aims to lower energy
consumption and maintenance costs. It’s also a huge gamble on the future of
transmission technology, doubling down on consumers’ willingness to upgrade.
The most important
promise made by the proprietors of 5G wireless technology -- the
telecommunications service providers, the transmission equipment makers, the
antenna manufacturers, and even the server manufacturers -- is this: Once all
of 5G's components are fully deployed and operational, you will not need any
kind of wire or cable to deliver communications or even entertainment service
to your mobile device, to any of your fixed devices (HDTV, security system,
smart appliances), or to your automobile. If everything works, 5G would be the
optimum solution to the classic "last mile" problem: Delivering
complete digital connectivity from the tip of the carrier network to the
customer, without drilling another hole through the wall.
Overlooked by London's
skyscrapers EE's 5G mobile trial kicks off.
The "if" in
that previous sentence remains colossal. The whole point of "Gs" in
wireless standards, originally, was to emphasize the ease of transition between
one wireless system of delivery and a newer one -- or at least make that transition
seem reasonably pain-free. (Not that any transition has ever been a trip to the
fair.) 5G entails a set of simultaneous revolutions, all of which would
have to go off without a hitch. . . or at least without any further hitches:
·
Converged
service could lead to unified carriers. In much of the continental US, a consumer's broadband internet
provider also has been her cable TV provider. And that relationship is
protected by municipally-regulated monopolies. 5G wireless aims to level the
playing field here, placing AT&T, Verizon, and a combined T-Mobile/Sprint
in competition against Comcast and Charter Communications, both for broadband
internet and "cable" television.
·
Small
cell infrastructure could remake landscapes. To reduce costs for 5G operators, 5G allows
for smaller transmitters that consume lower power, but that cover much smaller
service areas than typical 4G towers. A carrier will need more of them -- by one estimate, four hundred times more towers than
are currently deployed, though conceivably better integrated with the
landscape. The expectation is that a 5G small cell could become as common a
feature in urban areas as lampposts and graffiti.
·
The
global technology economy could be reconstructed. Suddenly Scandinavia, home of Finland's Nokia
and Sweden's Ericsson, becomes a world power center for telecommunications. And
China, whose state-owned China Mobile and state-supported Huawei are jointly
responsible for catalyzing 5G architecture, now has one of the most valuable
bargaining chips for superpower status it has ever had.
Once complete, the 5G
transition plan would constitute an overhaul of communications infrastructure
unlike any other in history. Imagine if, at the close of the 19th century, the
telegraph industry had come together in a joint decision to implement a staged
transition to fax. That's essentially the scale of the shift from 4G to 5G. The
real reason for this shift is not so much to get faster as to make the wireless
industry sustainable over the long term, as the 4G transmission scheme is approaching
unsustainability faster than the industry experts predicted.
Equipment staged by
NTT DOCOMO for 5G urban area trials in Japan.
(Image: Ericsson)
5G
WIRELESS USE CASES
The revolution, like
all others, will be subsidized. The initial costs of these 5G infrastructure
improvements may be tremendous, and consumers have already demonstrated their
intolerance for rate hikes. So to recover those costs, telcos will need to offer
new classes of service to new customer segments, for which 5G has made
provisions. Customers have to believe 5G wireless is capable of accomplishing
feats that were impossible for 4G.
·
Driverless
automobiles. For a world in
danger of spiraling downwards towards losing one million of its species
beginning in 2030, you might think the goal of eliminating drivers
from moving vehicles would be somewhat lower on the list. But the autonomous
vehicle (AV) use case does expose one of the critical necessities of modern
wireless infrastructure: It needs to connect people in motion with the
computers they may be relying upon to save lives, with near-zero latency.
The bandwidth required
for a VR application
Qualcomm
5G
·
Virtual
reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). For a cloud-based server to provide a
believable, real-time sensory environment to a wireless user, as mobile
processor maker Qualcomm asserted in a recent presentation, the connection
between that server and its user may need to supply as much as 5 gigabits per
second of bandwidth. In addition, the compute-intensive nature of an AR
workload may actually mandate that such workloads be directed to servers
stationed closer to their users, in systems that are relatively unencumbered by
similar workloads being processed for other users. In other words, AR and VR
may be better suited to small cell deployments anyway.
·
Cloud
computing. The internet is not
just the conduit for content, but the facilitator of connectivity in wide-area
networks (WAN). 5G wireless offers the potential for distributing cloud
computing services much closer to users than most of Amazon's, Google's, or
Microsoft's hyperscale data centers. In so doing, 5G could make telcos into
competitors with these cloud providers, particularly for high-intensity,
critical workloads. This is the edge computing scenario you may have heard
about: Bringing processing power forward, closer to the customer, minimizing
latencies caused by distance. If latencies can be eliminated just enough,
applications that currently require PCs could be relocated to smaller devices
-- perhaps even mobile devices that, unto themselves, have less processing
power than the average smartphone.
·
internet
of Things. In a household with
low-latency 5G connectivity, today's so-called "smart devices" that
are essentially smartphone-class computers could be replaced with dumb
terminals that get their instructions from nearby edge computing systems.
Kitchen appliances, climate control systems, and more importantly, health
monitors can all be made easier to produce and easier to control. The role
played today by IoT hubs, which some manufacturers are producing today to
cooperate alongside Wi-Fi routers, may in the future be played by 5G
transmitters in the neighborhood, acting as service hubs for all the households
in their coverage areas. In addition, machine-to-machine communications (M2M)
enables scenarios where devices such as manufacturing robots can coordinate
with one another for construction, assembly, and other tasks, under the
collective guidance of an M2M hub at the 5G base station.
·
Healthcare. The availability of low-latency connectivity
in rural areas would revolutionize critical care treatment for individuals
nationwide. No longer would patients in small towns be forced to upend their
lives and relocate to bigger cities, away from the livelihoods they know and
love, just to receive the level of care to which they should be entitled. As
recent trials in Mississippi are proving, connectivity at 5G levels enables
caregivers in rural and remote areas to receive real-time instruction and
support from the finest surgeons in the world, wherever they may be located.
To make the transition
feasible in homes and businesses, telcos are looking to move customers into a
5G business track now, even before most true 5G services exist yet. More to the
point, they're laying the "foundations" for technology
tracks that can more easily be upgraded to 5G, once those 5G
services do become available.
"It's not only
going to be we humans that are going to be consuming services," remarked
Nick Cadwgan, director of IP mobile networking, said "There's going to be
an awful lot of software consuming services. If you look at this whole thing
about massive machine-type communications [mMTC],
in the past it's been primarily the human either talking to a human or, when we
have the internet, the human requesting services and experiences from software.
Moving forward, we are going to have software as the requester, and that
software is going to be talking to software. So the whole dynamic of what
services we're going to have to deliver through our networks, is going to
change."
WHAT
IS 5G REALLY?
If we're being honest
(now is always a good time to start), it's incorrect to say that 5G is the
fifth generation of global wireless technology. Depending upon whom you ask,
and the context of the question, there are really either four or seven
generations, and only three sets of global standards.
There was never really
an official "1G." There were several attempts at standards for
digital wireless cellular transmission, none of which became global. The term
"2G" is credited to Finnish engineers to characterize the
technological leap forward that their GSM standard represented. However, much
of the rest of the world used CDMA instead, which was also "2G." So
there was never a single, uncontested 2G.
The global standards
community came together with 3G and their 3rd Generation Partnership Project
(3GPP). It was with the advent of 3G that the world started counting at the
same digit. But even for 4G, there were competing standards, and two major
groups of practitioners -- one for WiMAX, the other for the victorious LTE --
vying for global supremacy. The 5G effort has, so far, been successful at
keeping the engineers together around the same table, contributing towards a
single set of goals.
SPECIAL
FEATURE
5G will be popularized
via telecom carriers and the marketing of wire-cutting services, but the
biggest impact and returns will come from connecting the Internet of things,
edge computing and analytics infrastructure with minimal latency.
"The first
generation of mobile systems that were launched around 1991 -- popularly known
as 2G/GSM -- was really focused on massive mobile device communication,"
explained Sree Koratala, head of technology and strategy for 5G wireless in
North America for communications equipment provider Ericsson, speaking
with ZDNet. "Then the next generation of mobile networks, 3G,
launched starting in 1998, enabled mobile broadband, feature phones, and
browsing. When 4G networks were launched in 2008, smartphones popularized video
consumption, and data traffic on mobile networks really exploded.
"All these
networks primarily catered towards consumers," Koratala continued.
"Now when you look at this next generation of mobile networks, 5G, it is
very unlike the previous generation of network. It's truly an inflection point
from the consumer to the industry."
WHO
DECIDES WHAT AND WHERE 5G CAN BE
5G wireless is an explicit set of technologies specified
by 3GPP as "Release 15" and "Release 16," and recently, has
begun a track for "Release 17." 3GPP is an organization consisting of
essentially all the world's telecommunications standards bodies who agreed to
share the definition of 3G Wireless, and to move on from there to
next-generation networks. Today, 3GPP specifies which technologies constitute
5G wireless and, by exclusion, which do not.
The 5G wireless
standard aims to be global -- which is the hard part, because each
participating country (e.g., China, Russia, South Korea) or amalgamated body of
countries (e.g., the EU, the UN) will maintain its own definition of 5G
networks, its own concepts of 5G speed, and its own regulations for where 5G
transmissions may take place. In November 2018, the US Federal Communications
Commission began an auction for exclusive segments of spectrum in the 28 GHz
band, soon to be followed by bids in the 24 GHz band, for exclusive use by the
winning bidders. The following month, the FCC unanimously approved a plan to
make more spectrum in the 37 GHz, 39 GHz, and 47 GHz bands available for the
highest-speed communications tier for 5G wireless, called millimeter-wave
(mmWave).
Huawei's
"1+1" passive + active 5G antenna combination
Huawei
But a good part of the
5G plan involves multiple, simultaneous antennas, some of which utilize
spectrum that telcos agree to share with one another (for instance, the 3.5 GHz
band in the US) as well as unlicensed spectrum that regulators such as the FCC keep
open for everyone at all times (areas between 5 GHz and 7 GHz, and 57 GHz to 71
GHz). Among the technologies inside the 5G umbrella are systems enabling
transmitters and receivers to arbitrate access to unused channels in the
unlicensed spectrum, much the way 802.11ac Wi-Fi devices do now.
It's vitally important
not to confuse gigahertz (GHz, which refers to frequency) with gigabits (Gb,
which are quantities of transmitted data). Data throughput speeds for 5G are,
as with 4G, measured in gigabits per second (Gbps).
Just because 5G
networks will operate at higher frequencies does not make it faster. Those
higher frequencies are chosen mainly because they've not been used by anything
else yet. And this is where things will get very tricky down the road: Very
high-frequency signals do not travel far at all, which is one reason why 5G
cellular networks will be smaller, with more transmitters operating within
denser cells.
DRIVING
FOR HIGHER YIELDS
5G is comprised of
several technology projects in both communications and data center
architecture, all of which must collectively yield benefits for telcos as well
as customers, for any of them to be individually considered successful. The
majority of these efforts are in one of three categories:
·
Spectral
efficiency -- Making more
optimal use of multiple frequencies so that greater bandwidths may be extended
across further distances from base stations (historically, the main goal of any
wireless "G");
·
Energy
efficiency -- Leveraging
whatever technological gains there may be for both transmitters and servers, in
order to drastically reduce cooling costs;
·
Utilization -- To afford the tremendous
communications infrastructure overhaul that 5G may require, telcos may need to
create additional revenue generating services such as edge computing and mobile
apps hosting, placing them in direct competition with public cloud providers.
SERVICE
TIERS
Projection of
interrelated 5G service tiers
(Image:International
Telecommunications Union)
It was during the
implementation of 4G that telcos realized they wished they had different grades
of infrastructure to support different classes of service. 5G allows for three
service grades that may be tuned to the special requirements of their customers'
business models:
·
Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) aims to service more densely populated
metropolitan centers with downlink speeds approaching 1 Gbps (gigabits-per-second)
indoors, and 300 Mbps (megabits-per-second) outdoors. It would accomplish this
through the installation of extremely high-frequency
millimeter-wave (mmWave) antennas throughout the landscape --
on lampposts, the sides of buildings, the branches of trees, existing electrical towers,
and in one novel use case proposed by AT&T, the tops of city busses. Since
each of these antennas, in the metro use case, would cover an area probably no
larger than a baseball diamond, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them would be
needed to thoroughly service any densely populated downtown area. And since
most would not be omnidirectional -- their maximum beam width would only be
about 4 degrees -- mmWave antennas would bounce signals off of each other's
mirrors, until they eventually reached their intended customer locations. For
more suburban and rural areas, eMBB would seek to replace 4G's current LTE
system, with a new network of lower-power omnidirectional antennas providing 50
Mbps downlink service.
·
Massive
Machine Type Communications (mMTC) [PDF] enables the
machine-to-machine (M2M) and internet of Things (IoT) applications that a new
wave of wireless customers may come to expect from their network, without
imposing burdens on the other classes of service. Experts in the M2M and
logistics fields have been on record saying that 2G service was perfectly fine
for the narrow service bands their signaling devices required, and that later
generations actually degraded that service by introducing new sources of
latency. MMTC would seek to restore that service level by implementing a
compartmentalized service tier for devices needing downlink bandwidth as low as
100 Kbps (kilobits-per-second, right down there with telephone modems) but with
latency kept low at around 10 milliseconds (ms).
·
Ultra
Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) would address critical needs communications where
bandwidth is not quite as important as speed -- specifically, an end-to-end
latency of 1 ms or less. This would be the tier that addresses the autonomous
vehicle category, where decision time for reaction to a possible accident is
almost non-existent. URLLC could actually make 5G competitive with satellite,
opening up the possibility -- still in the discussion phase among the telcos --
of 5G replacing GPS for geolocation.
(Image: 3GPP.org)
The full release
of the first complete set of 5G standards (officially
"Release 15") by 3GPP took place in June 2018. By the end of 2019,
the organization expects to declare a supplemental set of 5G standards called
"Release 16." That release is slated to include specifications for:
·
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications, which would incorporate low-latency links
between moving vehicles (especially those with autonomous driving systems) and
cloud data centers, enabling much of the control and maintenance software for
moving vehicles to operate from within stationary, staffed, and maintained data
centers.
·
Satellite
access, which may include
the ability for satellite transmission to fill in gaps for under-served or
geographically remote areas.
·
Wireline
convergence, which would finally
deliver the outcome that AT&T famously warned Congress was absolutely
necessary for the communications industry to survive: The phasing out of
separate wireline service infrastructure and the deconstruction of the old telephone
lines and circuit-switched networks that were the backbone of the Bell System,
and other state-sanctioned monopoly service providers of the 20th century.
ARE
"5G EVOLUTION" AND OTHER INTERMEDIATE STEPS NECESSARY FOR 5G?
The true purpose of 5G
wireless, as you'll see momentarily, is to produce a global business model
where expenses are lower and revenue from services is higher, on account of the
presence of more and greater services than 4G could provision for. So there is
a valid argument, from a marketing standpoint, in favor of a gradual
deconstruction of 4G branding. As consumers hear more and more about the onset
of 5G, enumeration leaves them feeling more and more like their 4G equipment is
old and obsolete.
With so many
technologies under the 5G umbrella -- home broadband, office broadband, home
television, internet of Things, in-vehicle communication, as well as mobile
phone -- there's no guarantee that, when it comes time, any consumer will
choose the same provider for each one unless that consumer is willing to sign a
contract beforehand. That's why telcos are stepping up their 5G branding
efforts now, including rolling out preliminary 4G upgrades with 5G monikers,
and re-introducing the whole idea of 5G to consumers as a fuzzy, cloudy,
nebulous entity that encapsulates a sci-fi-like ideal of the future.
"The general
purpose technology for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is actually the
ambiguous sort of connectivity that 5G can bring," admitted Verizon CEO
Hans Vestberg, in no less conspicuous an arena than the keynote address of CES
2019.
Verizon CEO Hans
Vestberg explains "5G for All" to attendees at CES 2019.
[Photo courtesy
Verizon]
"So what is 5G?
5G is a promise," Vestberg continued, "of so much more than we've
ever seen in any wireless technology. From the beginning, we had the 1G, the
2G, the 3G, and the 4G. They were sort of leaps of differences, when it comes
to speed and throughput. When we think about 5G, we think about 10 gigabits per
second throughput, we talk about 10x battery life, we think about 1000 times
more data volumes in the networks. It's just radically different. I would say
it's a quantum leap compared to 4G."
The first wave of
5G-branded services are effectively 4G, or 4G extensions, that place consumers
on the right track for future 5G upgrades, thus guaranteeing the revenue
sources that 5G will require to be successful, or if only to just break even.
·
Verizon's
"First on 5G" began
with the October 2018 rollout of what's being called 5G Home -- a broadband
Wi-Fi service that bundles wireless phone with no-longer-cable TV service, for
a price that, after short-term discounts, could rise to as much as $120 per
month. In the test cities where it was first deployed, 5G Home may utilize
wireless spectrum that is indeed being earmarked for 5G. Yet it involved a
grade of equipment only capable of 300 megabits-per-second (Mbps) throughput,
that would eventually need to be upgraded to 1 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) for it
to qualify as 5G technology. In January 2019, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg
indicated to financial analysts that 5G Home rollout may remain limited to the
initial test area for some time to come, as the company awaits new standards
for customer premise (CP) equipment, probably as part of 3GPP's Release 16.
This after it seemed clear to observers that Verizon was willing to continue
rolling out intermediate equipment with a "5G" brand until that time.
·
AT&T's
"5G Evolution" began
in December 2018 with the sudden, unanticipated appearance of a "5G
E" icon in the notifications area of 4G customers' phones. The icon
appears if the phone is presently being serviced by a 4G LTE transmitter
capable of being upgraded to 5G specifications. Those transmitters may have
begun using frequencies over and above those originally reserved for 4G LTE, in
addition to those already being used, for greater multiplexing and presumably
greater bandwidth, although phones may not necessarily be equipped to receive
these extra frequencies, even if they show the "5G E" icon.
·
AT&T's
"5G+" also began in December 2018, and refers to a
mobile hotspot service that uses an early version (some would say
"prototype") of the very-high-speed mmWave technology that is being
earmarked for 5G, in addition to existing 4G LTE. The hotspot device itself
(Netgear's Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot)
will be sold separately by AT&T for $499, while it offers the service for
$70 per month for the first 15 GB. With a theoretical peak throughput of 300
Mbps, it's conceivable that this device's initial bandwidth allocation could be
completely burned through in less than seven minutes' time.
Sprint
·
Sprint has plans to roll out its 5G-branded
service on May 31, 2019 in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City in May
2019, with plans to add five more U.S. cities in June. Its first 5G smartphone
-- the LG model V50 ThinQ -- premiered in May as well. The initial skepticism
generated by AT&T's and Verizon's rollouts have led many to conclude
Sprint's can't be "real 5G" as well. It will not include mmWave
service (which AT&T has championed), opting instead to deploy so-called
mid-band frequencies using MIMO multiple antenna technology. Sprint CTO Dr.
John Saw called this deployment "Split Mode," saying, "Because
we have 160 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum in our top 100 markets, we can afford to
support both LTE and 5G simultaneously using the same 2.5 GHz band." Some
say "Split Mode" isn't really 5G either, although Saw presented this
system at a conference heavily attended by 3GPP, and no one appeared to object
(at least not publicly).
·
T-Mobile has yet to complete its merger with
Sprint, mostly for regulatory reasons. In the meantime, the company has said it
plans to launch what it characterizes as "true 5G service" to select
cities, very soon after the merger is allowed to go through. In a statement, the company says it will need
access to the mid-range of 5G spectrum currently delegated for Sprint, in
addition to the low- and high-range spectrum T-Mobile currently holds, to
deliver the first wave of its services. It's the combination of these two
companies' respective spectrum that is the key to both being able to offer a
high-speed 5G tier using Massive MIMO that they both feel would be competitive
against mmWave. T-Mobile CEO John Legere has blasted AT&T's 5G E
initiative, taking to Twitter last March to call it "a flat-out lie."
HOW
GLOBAL WARMING MADE 5G AN URGENT NECESSITY
TECHREPUBLIC
Why 5G could be the
last standard we ever need.
In May 2017, AT&T
President of Technology Operations Bill Hogg declared the existing
wireless business model for cell tower rental, operation, and
maintenance "unsustainable." Some months earlier, a J. P. Morgan
analyst characterized the then-business model for wireless providers in
Southeast Asia as unsustainable, warning that the then-current system has
rendered it impossible for carriers to keep up with customer demand. And
as research firm McKinsey & Company asserted
in a January 2018 report, the growth path for Japan's existing wireless
infrastructure is becoming "unsustainable," rendering 5G for that
country "a necessity."
One senses a theme.
The world's telcos
need a different, far less constrained, business model than what 4G has left
them with. The only way they can accomplish this is with an infrastructure that
generates radically lower costs than the current scenario, particularly for maintaining,
and mainly cooling, their base station equipment.
Cooling and the costs
associated with facilitating and managing cooling equipment, according to
studies from analysts and telcos worldwide, account for more than half of
telcos' total expenses for operating their wireless networks. Global warming
(which, from the perspective of meteorological instrumentation, is
indisputable) is a direct contributor to compound annual increases in wireless
network costs. Ironically, as this 2017 study by China's National Science Foundation asserts,
the act of cooling 4G LTE equipment alone may contribute as much as 2% to the
entire global warming problem.
THE
WORLD'S BIGGEST EXAMPLE
China Mobile's
breakdown of its annual capital and operational expenditures for maintaining
one 3G base station.
(Image: China Mobile)
The 2013 edition of a study by
China Mobile, that country's state-licensed service provider,
examined the high costs of maintaining energy-inefficient equipment in its 3G
wireless network, which happens to be the largest on the planet in both
territory and customers served. In 2012, CM estimated its network had consumed
14 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually. As much as 46% of the
electricity consumed by each base station, it estimated, was devoted to air
conditioning.
That study proposed a
new method of constructing, deploying, and managing network base stations.
Called Cloud architecture RAN (C-RAN), it's a method of building, distributing,
and maintaining transmitter antennas that history will record as having
triggered the entire 5G movement.
One of the hallmarks
of C-RAN cell site architecture is the total elimination of the on-site base
band unit (BBU) processors, which were typically co-located with the site's
radio head. That functionality is instead virtualized and moved to a
centralized cloud platform, for which multiple BBUs' control systems share
tenancy, in what's called the baseband pool. The cloud data center is powered
and cooled independently, and linked to each of the base stations by no greater
than 40km of fiber optic cable.
An Ericsson 5G
transmitter used in NTT DOCOMO's Japan trials.
(Image: Ericsson)
Moving BBU processing
to the cloud eliminates an entire base transmission system (BTS) equipment room
from the base station (BS). It also completely abolishes the principal source
of heat generation inside the BS, making it feasible for much, if not all, of
the remaining equipment to be cooled passively -- literally, by exposure to the
open air. The configuration of that equipment could then be optimized, like the
5G trial transmitter shown above, constructed by Ericsson for Japan's NTT
DOCOMO. The goal for this optimization is to reduce a single site's power
consumption by over 75%.
What's more, it takes
less money to rent the site for a smaller base station than for a large one.
Granted, China may have a unique concept of the real estate market compared to
other countries. Nevertheless, China Mobile's figures show that rental fees
with C-RAN were reduced by over 71%, contributing to a total operational
expenditure (OpEx) reduction for the entire base station site of 53%.
Keep in mind, though,
that China Mobile's figures pertained to deploying and maintaining 3G
equipment, not 5G. But the new standards for transmission and network access,
called 5G New Radio (5G NR), are being designed with C-RAN ideals in mind, so
that the equipment never generates enough heat to trip that wire, requiring
OpEx to effectively quadruple.
THE
NEW CLOUD AT THE NEW EDGE
It would appear a lot
of the success of 5G rests upon this new class of cloud data centers, into
which the functionality of today's baseband units would move. As of now, there
is still considerable uncertainty as to where this centralized RAN controller would
reside. There are competing definitions.
Some have taken a good
look at the emerging crop of edge data centers sprouting
adjacent to today's cell towers, and are suggesting that the new Service
Oriented Core (SOC) could be distributed across those locations. Yet skeptics
are wondering, why bother with the elimination of the BTS station in the first
place, if the SOC would only put it back? Alternately, a separate SOC station
could be established that services dozens of towers simultaneously. The problem
there, obviously, is that such a station would be a full-fledged data center in
itself, which would have real estate and cooling issues of its own.
Either option might be more palatable, some
engineers believe, if the servers operating there could delegate computing
infrastructure among internal operations and special customer services -- edge
computing services that could compete with cloud providers such as Amazon and
Microsoft Azure, by leveraging much lower latency. The ability to do so is
entirely dependent upon a concept called network slicing. This is the
subdivision of physical infrastructure into virtual platforms, using a
technique perfected by telecommunications companies called network functions virtualization
(NFV).
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