Verizon Faces Reality on the Best 5G Mission

Verizon seems to be recognizing that the path to 5G success isn’t fantasy services, but the symbiosis between 5G, mobile services, and home broadband. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that, not only for Verizon but also for 5G and the networking industry. Of course, that fact that even a giant Tier One can face the truth isn’t necessarily a victory for the truth, so we’ll have to consider not only what this could mean, but how it might not work out.

Operators didn’t create 5G’s problems. They considered 5G an essential evolution of wireless technology, and they budgeted for its deployment in much the same way as they had for the deployment of earlier wireless generations. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a chance that 5G would “fail”.

The problem is that this orderly evolution is not only unlikely to quickly fatten vendor coffers, it’s as dull as dishwater to the media/analyst community, for whom anything less than a revolution isn’t worth of note. The desire of the media to make excitement, and the opportunity that creates for vendors to hype something beyond its dull, orderly, and certain progress, combined to make everyone believe that 5G had to be a revolution to succeed.

This belief hid some of the most important truths about 5G, truths beyond simple mobile evolution. Objectively, 5G offers higher bandwidth per cell and per user connection. In millimeter-wave form, 5G can deliver bandwidth that would challenge everything except fiber to the home (FTTH). In its mobile form, it can beat copper-loop DSL handily as a home networking replacement. Thus, it’s always been true and always been known that the most likely first step 5G might take beyond mobile networking would be wireline replacement.

I’ve blogged before, most recently yesterday, about what 5G might bring to that market. The biggest problem with bringing quality broadband to thin-demand areas is the cost of connecting the user to a fiber-fed nodal junction, and the second-biggest is the cost of connecting those nodal junctions back to the Internet. 5G doesn’t make it possible to feed 100Mbps broadband to everyone. There is no current technological answer to that within the reach of a rational public policy. It does make it possible to feed it to a lot more people, and to lower the cost of doing that to the point where subsidies could be significantly lower.

What’s important about the Verizon story is that it’s proof that big operators are seeing 5G more clearly, and that they’re asking what everyone should now realize is the critical question. That is whether the deployment of 5G in both wireless and wireline missions could create more than simple financial symbiosis between wireless and wireline.

From an infrastructure perspective, 5G is important for a number of reasons beyond those related to the transformation to the radio access network (RAN) that enables high-speed broadband delivery. First, it’s an attempt to move mobile networking and its infrastructure into the virtual age. Second, there is broad support for open implementations of 5G, particularly the Open RAN or O-RAN initiative. Third, the spread of 5G into wireline could promote a shift in how we think about the relationship between network connections and services. We’ll look at all three of these further, here and now.

In the promotion of virtualization, it’s not all beer and roses, as the saying goes. The 3GPP’s intentions with their shift toward virtual functions is positive, but the specific mechanism of NFV is not. We should have learned the lesson that virtual anything had to mean “cloud-native”, meaning that cloud technology should have been the foundation of 5G, not NFV. Instead, what happened was almost as bad as it would have been for the 3GPP to mandate that everyone had to create custom chips for every piece of 5G. You build virtual-function hosting from cloud tools, period, and we’re still not accepting that truth. However, we’re drifting toward the right place in any event, because specifications like O-RAN don’t really mandate NFV as much as use it as an example.

Network slicing is another form of virtualization, and one that’s really important more for what it could turn into than for what’s being suggested for it today. We know about the concept of “virtual networks”; it’s embodied in VPNs, SD-WAN, and so forth. We also have examples of network separation in fiber transport based on wavelength (lambda), and network slicing gives us something very similar with radio-network technology. It may be that the first real, good, applications of network slicing are involving the separation of wireless and wireline replacement services.

Virtualization is a good jumping-off point to O-RAN. If we were to follow 3GPP specifications blindly, 5G RAN would inherit NFV explicitly because the primary mobile network vendors are fixated on formal standards. On the other hand, O-RAN is very explicit about APIs and functional elements and not so specific about how exactly they’re hosted, orchestrated, and managed. That stuff tends to be outside the O-RAN diagrams, meaning that implementations could tweak things a bit more toward the cloud. Given that many (even perhaps most) O-RAN implementations are being promoted by vendors who live more on the cloud side than in the network, it seems inevitable that this will result in cloud-native O-RAN options.

The reason that’s important is that cloud-native has to grow from a seed, in both operators’ infrastructure and in their hearts and minds. 5G O-RAN can be that seed, the reference implementation for cloud-native that’s fully budgeted and approved. The techniques operators can learn in O-RAN can then spread to the rest of the network, and eventually be the collective infrastructure and software framework for carrier cloud and all its possible applications.

That’s the opening to the last of the possible real impacts of 5G, and in particular the use of 5G in both wireless and wireline replacement missions. What is a “service”? Is it a connection delivered in a specific way to a location (wireline) or user (wireless), or is it something that’s fuzzier, and because of the fuzz more potentially exciting in its definition?

We’ve already glimpsed some of this service fuzz in WiFi calling. Many mobile network plans (and phones) will support making and receiving calls and messages on a mobile number while connected to WiFi rather than to traditional cellular service. This often takes some special technology, but suppose 5G in general or O-RAN in particular were used for both connections?

Let’s start by acknowledging that 5G mm-wave technology might or might not be implemented using the same technology (notably O-RAN) as mobile 5G. If it is not, then for 5G/FTTN hybrid applications, the use of 5G doesn’t impact this particular point. If it is, then do we have a notion of a “portable” service?

5G might be used to create what’s effectively a mobile demarcation (mmarc) that’s independent of the delivery mechanism. Such an mmarc, when the user is truly mobile, is supported by the user’s 5G service. If the user is at home, the mmarc might map through WiFi back to the 5G-to-the-home service. All that is logical, but suppose that the user was in someone else’s home, or in a specialty public hot spot?

5G could allow us to define service to the mmarc rather than to the connection point, which means that a user who had a high level of service might still enjoy it if they were in a location whose service was limited to a lower speed. I go visit Charlie (with proper COVID precautions), and he has 30Mbps broadband via 5G to his home. I have 100Mbps broadband, so when I visit Charlie, I’ve got that capability on my device, over his WiFi and his connection, because the 5G delivery to Charlie’s home keeps him at 30 Mbps while letting me ride up to what I’ve paid for. Maybe I pay for this “mobile flexibility” and maybe Charlie has to offer it, but it could be done.

We could also see public areas like airports offering “rateless 5G”, which takes on the personality of the user’s plan whoever the user is. Something like this could be a promotable feature for 5G in hospitality settings, versus WiFi. A complete notion of service portability could transform everything, and spreading 5G concepts fully through the network could be a step toward getting to that, not to mention a step toward a true “network-as-a-service” or NaaS.

5G symbiosis and NaaS is just a slightly deeper model of NaaS than SD-WAN offers, a way to make a virtual network more virtual by taking it downward a bit. Could this combination be the future of networking? Could be.