McEwen agrees: “We would not recommend a customer to rely on one carrier’s 5G. That is hugely risky because there is no such thing as 100% perfect coverage. Customers may not use LTE or 3G, but these are prudent fallbacks.” Much of this is to do with the delay in rolling out the full-fat flavour of the technology. Early phases of 5G relied on existing infrastructure (non-stand-alone networks) to deliver 5G and are only now moving to stand-alone (SA) technology, in which the whole network has been upgraded to 5G. Without SA 5G, there can be no network slicing, a much-heralded benefit to broadcasters. “Speaking frankly, SA took a little longer to roll out than carriers would have liked,” argues Dan Pisarski, CTO at LiveU. “Covid-19 may have played some role there. Now, we’re seeing more SA networks available, leading to the ability to finally leverage slicing after many years of speaking about it. “Widespread deployment is the next milestone; ubiquitous access to an SA network is the next big leap. This opens the door to widespread slicing and should lead to higher performance on the public networks. Some more specialised parts of 5G only happen due to virtualisation of the network core.” GOING PRIVATE In the interim, the industry has sought to bypass public networks and set up private 5G networks specifically for event coverage use. There is already a clear disparity of investment between the two. The private network market is expected to grow
NOW, WE’RE SEEING MORE SA NETWORKS AVAILABLE, LEADING TO FINALLY LEVERAGING SLICING AFTER MANY YEARS OF SPEAKING ABOUT IT
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