The future of 5G: disruptions, opportunities and a look ahead
Summary
“We’re actually very excited about network disaggregation and O-RAN - weve been participating in this wireless space for a long time and seen the transitions,” said Greg Henderson, Senior Vice President, Vertical Markets, Analog Devices. So by leveraging virtualisation, you can have a multi-vendor environment, and by creating standard interfaces, you can have more flexible network features with increased capability, and potentially a lot more ecosystem partners. “Huge opportunities lie in the ability of the ecosystem to focus on lowering the total cost of ownership for the networks through economies of scale, tackling software flexibility and cloud infrastructure leverage,” he added. Compute capabilities and a software-based architecture can give rise to new services by providing network operators with the possibility of running other workloads at the edge as opposed to just voice and data. We are very pleased that with our partnership with ADI we were recently able to announce a full-blown massive MIMO platform using our respective silicon, along with all the software to fill that gap.” Security will obviously be an issue with O-RAN, more so, Singh explained, as we start looking at front hauls that are packet-based rather than IQ data, which are more vulnerable to attacks and invasions.