Selecting the Right Ingredients for 5G

When it comes to planning and building a 5G network, the process has a lot of similarities with daily life tasks. Take cooking, for instance. If we want to create delicious food for our friends or family, we need to plan what to cook, determine the best recipe, and purchase quality ingredients. While you could do all of it yourself, you could also instill your trust in a master chef to use their expertise to prepare an excellent meal. Not only does it save you loads of time, but it also spares you the anxiety related to the quality of your food.

In a similar fashion, when creating a 5G network, operators aim to provide their customers with the latest and greatest services via the fastest means possible. Each step must be carefully planned, selecting the different technology ingredients and partaking in a significant amount of integration to “cook it.” The integration process can prove even more time consuming if the elements come from multiple vendors.

The core is a fundamental building block of the 5G network, as it is programmable, aiding fast and agile service creation while permitting automated network slicing. Although a core network can be built from distinct elements, it will require dedicated time for integration. Likewise, a multivendor core will incur maintenance overhead, as upgrades to software packages must be verified to ensure seamless collaboration with other elements.

Kiss Overhead Goodbye

As operators are tasked with the challenge of getting their new foundational services into commercial operation in a timely manner, the time-to-market cycle is crucial. Quick and reliable rollouts of 5G cores are essential for this and are ultimately achieved by avoiding time spent on integrating a complex, multivendor core.

Of similar importance is the maintenance strategy of the new 5G core. Software upgrades must be seamless and deployed in a predictable fashion that takes the least amount of time, so the core network can easily be operated and maintained.

Integration and Certification

In order to simplify tasks for operators, it’s important to mitigate the risks affiliated with deployment and integration by quickening the process while ensuring predictable life-cycle management. This is best achieved through off-the-shelf solutions that are certified and pre-integrated, such as Nokia’s 5G Core Engineered Systems, which require a series of system tests to ensure significant onsite integration time savings.

Additionally, this simplifies operations in the long run by ensuring software upgrades are current at a system level. Operators receive a robust, high-performance solution, which is always up-to-date and certified via delivery of release combinations and continuous testing.

This concept has come to fruition in readymade packages in both 4G and now 5G. For instance, with 5G, there are packages that deliver a complete pre-integrated 5G core network in the shortest time possible.

Wherever you are in your plan to deliver 5G, time-to-market and quality are vital. 5G solutions ultimately deliver packages on a frequent basis, keeping customers up to speed with the latest infrastructure and application evolvements. Ensuring an operator has the right ingredients to efficiently monetize 5G services and assess new business cases with higher predictability and clarity is key to serving up optimal 5G.