5G promises a massive increase in bandwidth, faster speeds and lower latency – three advantages that are in demand due to the proliferation of technology like Internet of Things (IoT). But, as Macy Bayern points out in her recent TechRepublic article, to meet the demands of 5G deployments, enterprises will need to bolster their infrastructure strategy with compute capacity at the edge.
Right now, 5G is in trial rollouts in select cities like Houston, and Gartner predicts that more than half of organizations will implement 5G by the end of next year. However, the new network is not yet widespread enough to support the desired business use cases. At the moment, this isn’t a huge problem, but enterprises are planning on quickly adopting 5G, perhaps faster than infrastructure can keep up. In the same TechRepublic article, Bayern quotes Sylvain Fabre, senior research director at Gartner, who acknowledges this problem:
“In the short to medium term, organizations wanting to leverage 5G for use cases such as IoT communications, video, control and automation, fixed wireless access and high-performance edge analytics cannot fully rely on 5G public infrastructure for delivery.”
According to Bayern’s reading of the Gartner report, “by 2022, half of communications service providers that have been able to launch commercial 5G won’t be able to meet the 5G use cases companies want.” To fill that gap, businesses will need to focus on 5G networks that offer core slicing, radio network densification and edge computing.
Every millisecond counts in computing and data delivery and because of this, even the physical proximity between end user and computing location can massively impact customer experiences. With fewer hops required, edge computing improves network latency by decreasing the physical distance and reducing steps between user and server.
Once 5G is readily available, edge computing will continue to help 5G reach its potential by easing packet bottlenecks. 5G presents a great amount of opportunity for enterprises, and in order to help leverage the next-generation wireless, IT leaders will need to support their data delivery method with edge computing.
To learn more about how Netrality’s interconnected edge data centers enable 5G, contact us.
