5G is more than an evolution of mobile broadband, it will be the architectural and design improvements to address future requirements for broadband capacity on demand. It will be a key enabler of the future digital world, with ultra-high broadband infrastructure that will support the transformation of processes and the growing consumer market demand in all economic sectors.

The main 5G Enablers are millimetre wave Technology, Ultra Wideband Radio, High-order MIMO, Cloud-RAN, Adaptive Air Interfaces, Information Centric Networking, Network Function Virtualisation, Orchestration/Automation and Software Defined Networking etc. 5G networks will involve so much fibre – backhaul for increasingly dense, high capacity access networks; fronthaul for Cloud-RANs.

Network operators want to extract “relevant information” from the network without wasting transport network bandwidth passing around unnecessary amounts of operational data. It is more efficient to use compute resources closer to the edge to run the machine learning, analyse and send the insights upstream to the network. Then operators can “leverage this knowledge for automated service provisioning as well as network control and management”.