Viavi Solutions Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this latest webinar from IHS Market titled, Serving the Mobile Transport with NG PON Technologies. Mobile operators need to address the strict performance requirements of a demanding mobile transport network. So today, our panel will explore the various challenges and detail how next-generation PON technologies can be leveraged to overcome them. Our webinar is co-presented by IHS Market and our partners, Nokia and VIAVI Solutions. My name is Alan Tatara, Senior Event Manager for the IHS Market Technology Group webinar team, and I want to thank everyone for joining us. So before we begin, I want to highlight some features available for you that are available on the webinar. So the console that you're looking at, it is completely customizable. So this means you can open, close, move, or resize any of the windows that you have open on your screen and arrange the console any way you like. At the bottom of your console, you see a number of application widgets which contain additional features available for you. I do want to talk about the resource list widget, and this is where you're going to find additional material about our topic, including the downloadable slide deck from today's session, as well as other valuable information, including a special report authored by analyst Mariana Angelou. So make sure you check these out during the webinar. You're also going to notice a Twitter widget, and this means you'll be able to tweet directly from the console. And today, we're using the hashtag mobile transport. We will also have a live Q&A session directly after our presentation, so please remember to submit your questions or comments at any time by using that Q&A box that you see on the left side of your screen. Also, this webinar is being recorded, and the on-demand version will be sent back to you within about 24 hours. And if you encounter any technical issues, just click on that question mark widget and you will get the answers that you need. So now let me introduce our panel. First leading our discussion is Dr. Mariana Angelou. Mariana is a principal research analyst in the service provider technology segment at IHS Market. We are also joined by Ronald Heron. Ron is a lead technology strategist on the fixed networks CTO team at Nokia. And rounding out our panel, we have Dr. Reza Vaez-Gayemi. Reza is Senior Manager of Product Line Management at VIAVI Solutions. So welcome to our panel. Pleasure having you with us today. So let's get started. Mariana, I will pass the controls over to you.

Brilliant. Thank you, Alan. And thank you all for joining. So over the next hour, we will explore some of the market trends driving mobile transport networks. And we will also discuss how broader networks can support the mobile transport and effectively enable new practices and operating models. A focal point to our session today is, of course, 5G, and Ron and Reza will walk us through the transformation of the underlying transport required to really support the 5G traffic. In the second part of our session, we will introduce some of the benefits of leveraging existing fiber access assets as a viable alternative for mobile transport, and we will discuss also what is the role that passive optical networks can play in the 5G context. We will then delve into the access technologies that are suitable to serve the so-called actual network and touch upon the innovations that are required to really meet the 5G constraints and serve a range of different services over the fixed access network. At the end of the session, as Alan mentioned, we will have some time for Q&A. So if you have any questions as we progress, please enter those in the Q&A interface, and we will address them at the end of the presentation. So with that, let's get started. So first off, what I wanted to do with this slide was basically provide some context around mobile transport that arguably represents a fundamental component of mobile networks. Indeed, in our annual survey on the evolution of 4G to 5G, we asked service providers in which part of their network they see the biggest amount of development required to make 5G happen. As expected, of course, 52% believe the radio remains the most challenging component, but it's followed by transport with 24%, and management at 18%. So in addition to introducing the technologically challenging radio component, for sure, the advent of 5G will drive transformation also in the underlying transport network to serve the range of new applications that are enabled by 10 times higher wireless speeds and very low latency, and ultra-reliable connectivity that everyone is really talking about. But with the introduction of 5G in 2019, IHS market anticipates growth, of course, in backhaul connections through to 2023, but with more fiber closer to the radio endpoint. So indeed, fiber makes up an increasing share of the mobile backhaul installed connections, and it grows from 44% in 2017 to 56% in 2023, actually taking share from the more traditional microwave and corporate technologies. As I said, fiber access technologies will assume a prominent role in supporting the mobile backhaul and it's going to be driven by the availability of that infrastructure and enabled by innovations, some of which we will address later on in our session. But because mobile transport is no longer synonymous only with backhaul, especially in light of the emerging 5G mid-haul and front-haul segments, next-generation fixed access technologies are actually required to cope with the constraints of that evolving mobile transport. So before handing over to Ron and Reza to walk us through some of these challenges of the 5G ex-fall, I wanted to leave you with a view of the next-generation PON activity around the globe. So recently, 10G-class fiber access technologies have begun to ship in volume, and in the long term, Growth will be driven, of course, by demand for broadband connectivity, but also to support the mobile transport. Existing 10G-capable PON technologies are on the rise globally, although we currently, of course, identify the long-term opportunity mostly in Asia Pacific and China in particular. However, we have seen spending increasing in EMEA and South and Central America, on Next Generation Pond in 2018, and we have also seen in the North American market some very positive indications, also with some 10G-capable fibers to the home rollout, either in progress or in planning phase. So, in the context of 5G, and in the race for 5G commercialization, the mobile operators around the world with access to that to a strong fiber to the home footprint will be able to tap into that existing infrastructure and potentially lower the cost of the mobile transport network. So and with that last comment, I will hand it over to Ron to basically talk to us about some of the challenges of the 5G transport. Ron?

Yes, okay, thank you very much. So 5G is coming, and we all know, we all hear about it. It is enabling new promising services that were not possible before with LTE. We hear of three classes, the enhanced mobile broadband, which is like LTE on steroids, focusing on higher bandwidth everywhere. Ultra reliability, ultra reliable low latency communications, which is an enabler of industry 4.0, or mission critical communications, robotics, autonomous vehicles, not necessarily high bandwidth, but very reliable and very low latency. And then the third one being massive machine-to-machine communications, aiming to provide massive connectivity to billions of devices with high availability and low latency. You can see these three categories have special requirements that were different from the previous generation that we need to take into consideration for the access network. Some of those are shown there. The number of things is at least an order of 10, maybe 100 times what we used to deal with with people, number of endpoints. The speed could be an order of 100 times faster. The latency requirements for the services themselves can be much lower than they ever were before. And we're requiring service-level agreements with quality of service for lifeline-type applications. And there's the emergence of this requirement for network slicing, which are virtual networks, logical networks within the end-to-end network. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. So we'll delve into some of these ways that the broadband access networks can address these. But looking a little bit more at the nature of 5G, let's look at the spectrum that is used. 5G supports more bands and more bounce, a lot more. Now, historically, the LTE and previous generations used a spectrum in the low band on the left side of the screen. where, you know, there's good propagation, good reach, which allows for macro cells, but it's a very congested spectrum. Everybody wants to use that spectrum, so there's only small blocks of it available. So the bandwidth was generally small. We're talking 20 megahertz channels with, you know, maybe less than a gigabit type services. But 5G is moving... into the mid and the high band. Most countries in the world have set aside spectrum in both of those areas. The mid band from 3 to 6 gigahertz still has a relatively good propagation compared to the 28 or 24 plus, but still less than previous. So this will be driving the potential for smaller cells. And then even more so as we go to the 24 plus, or 28 or 38 gigahertz per second, gigahertz, the propagation characteristics are much shorter. Therefore, we'll be having even smaller cells. The good news is that these are new spectrum with lots of available bandwidth, large chunks. So basically, the consequence of these two evolutions are that there will be a lot more cells as we go to smaller cells, and there'll be a whole lot more bandwidth to backhaul. So I'm going to pass it over to Reza to continue on this thought.