The recent global economic slowdown has inevitably hindered investment and rollout of 5G networks. As we all know, the deployment of 5G networks requires a lot of money, and their operation requires a lot of electricity. In a good global economy, these costs can be recouped by increasing the additional fees that users pay for a high-performance network. But in today’s economy, users themselves are under pressure to cut costs.

As a result, there have been reports of mobile network operators delaying 5G network construction and scaling back plans. Still, I don’t want to go into the headwinds here, because I’m confident about 5G’s development in the coming year.

The overall construction of 5G May be delayed, but it will not be derailed

Two big changes are already underway (and likely to accelerate in 2024) : simplification of 5G base stations that can reduce costs, and the emergence of new disruptive business use cases that leverage the unique capabilities of 5G networks.

The combination of these two factors will likely bring new energy and enthusiasm to the technology, which is expected to remain the foundation of wireless connectivity for at least the next decade or two. So I think the coming year will prove that 5G May be delayed, but never derailed.

Simplify and reduce costs

The initial phase of 5G network deployment uses non-standalone networking (NSA), which uses existing LTE networks to provide mobile network and generation signals, taking full advantage of this approach to accelerate rollout. But it also adds

complexity to base station design, and in the world of wireless networking, “complexity” is really just another word for “cost.”

As a result, this superimposed NSA network architecture had to be compromised, making the technology fail to live up to the hype when it was first released. To truly streamline network architecture in the future, mobile network operators can no longer rely on the design of earlier network technologies. And thanks to some recent innovations in the industry, they no longer need to. Some of the measures to reduce complexity and cost include:

New antenna designs that integrate active and passive RF technologies into a streamlined, integrated form. Such antennas not only reduce the volume and weight of tower deployments, but also increase the flexibility of mobile network operators when designing their networks, as 5G and LTE networks can operate side-by-side with little impact on performance. These integrated designs can also reduce the wind load on the top of the tower, or eliminate the need for expensive carrier structure upgrades to support the newly added 5G components, reducing the upgrade cost of each base station by tens of thousands of dollars.
As mobile network operators switch from the most expensive and powerful 64T64R mMIMO solution on Acer to the more economical 32T32R mMIMO, properly scaling 5G can better balance costs and revenues, thereby reducing deployment costs without affecting the 5G services currently required. In addition, the optimized 8T8R passive solution can be used to replace the 64T64R and 32T32R mMIMO used on the macro base station and the 16T16R mMIMO used in the small base station for further cost savings.
As 5G device penetration increases and high-value use cases emerge, transition 5G networks from NSA architecture to standalone networking (SA) architecture. This will enable the network to evolve towards cloud-native deployments, reducing the cost of each base station device while also improving the power consumption and service delivery of the network through AI (for example, through the use of network slicing).
These emerging improvements all directly address the challenges of 5G deployment costs, making it easier for mobile network operators to start, continue, or accelerate rollout efforts.

Of course, if the market is not willing to bear the costs of adopting new features, even smarter, more modest investments will become irrational. Fortunately, a second key factor that will emerge in 2024 will also help solve this problem.

New 5G Business use cases – private networks

5G has a lot of unique performance features, starting with its incredible speed, huge capacity and ultra-low latency. But in some ways, 5G’s performance seems to have outpaced some of the needs it needs to meet. For example, the delay of 1 ms is very amazing, but the application that really needs it is still very few. High performance is undoubtedly driving the development of high-demand applications, but it will take some time for these applications to reach the market.

That being said, a number of new commercial use cases are emerging that see 5G as the preferred or even essential technology platform, even if they don’t require a latency of 1 ms. There is increasing interest in wireless private networks in large indoor, outdoor and indoor/outdoor combination places such as enterprises, large public places, and tourism distribution centers, where network traffic is often high.

Compared to LTE, 5G gains advantages in terms of capacity and throughput through the combined use of higher spectrum and more powerful wireless systems (mMIMO). It is no accident that the first 5G devices are being installed in more urban environments, but because it is only in these environments that 5G networks will be most effective at delivering high traffic density. But because of its link budget limitations, 5G is difficult to connect from outdoor macro stations to indoor users who contribute most of the traffic. Indoor small cell sites and DAS solutions can solve this problem by backforwarding indoor traffic to the core network, but another discrete 5G network – 5G private networks – has also emerged.

With an on-premises 5G network, businesses (or airports, hospitals, stadiums, etc.) can offer the security and privacy of 5G connectivity over regular Wi-Fi®. Users can enjoy the speed and capacity of 5G, which can only be guaranteed indoors, while taking advantage of the security of end-to-end encryption to protect voice, email, text and online activity on connected devices.

In fact, the security advantages of 5G private networks will only grow in the coming years. After 2024, it is expected that the advent of quantum secure cryptography (QSC), perhaps five or ten years away, will dramatically increase encryption strength and make current encryption methods obsolete. To this end, the GSMA established the Quantum Secure Telecommunications Networks Working Group last year with the aim of developing strong regulatory standards for the future use of such encryption technologies.

5G private networks will be one of the most anticipated new commercial use cases for 5G, a market that is still in its infancy. In 2024, global interest and investment in this secure, high-performance technology is bound to grow significantly.

5G will have a brighter year

The global economy and dynamic international situation may slow down the overall construction of 5G, but it has by no means stopped it. 5G technology has broad prospects and many advantages, and will not be suppressed in the long run. As far as the Chinese market is concerned, as of November 2023, China has built a total of 3.282 million 5G base stations, and 5G has increasingly deepened the empowerment of all walks of life. This year, thanks to base-station architecture optimization measures that can reduce costs and people’s interest in 5G private networks, 5G networks will continue to move forward.

6G is still in development, and 5G will be the foundation of wireless networks for at least the next decade. Therefore, the current headwinds will not prevent 5G from reaching its full potential in the long term; Instead, these changes have the potential to lead us in 2024 in new directions that are only now beginning to gain traction.