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

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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.