Now's the time to think about what comes after 5G: We need to make sure the backbone of every network can support future demands for data - [Spectral Lines

Abstract

5G technology, with its promises of self-driving vehicles and immersive virtual reality, will be a data-hungry generation of wireless communications. engineers have been so preoccupied with designing and building the low-latency networks for these emerging applications that they've neglected the rest of our vast, tangled telecom networks. The result is that there's now a growing gap between the capabilities of the fixed and mobile sides of these networks. • Think of the mobile side as the antennas and radio waves that deliver data to our devices. This is the side that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years with the advent of beamforming and millimeter waves. The fixed side is everything else—the cables, fibers, and switches that handle our long-distance communications. The United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency that coordinates telecom infrastructure between countries, launched a focus group in August to address this emerging imbalance in wireless communications. • Right now, when people start deploying [5G], it's the mobile side, says Richard Li, the chief scientist of future networks at Huawei and the chairman of the ITU Network 2030 focus group. But the fixed network side is still 4G. They do not match. The upshot is that while the larger amounts of data heralded by 5G will zip through edge infrastructure without delay, once that same data reaches the less-advanced core infrastructure it could very well be throttled. • A big part of the problem is that the way data moves through our networks has been designed for efficiency on the mobile side. In the process, according to Li, our networks have become redundant and prone to clogging on the fixed side.