TelecomTV TelecomTV
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Events
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • DSP Leaders
  • Great Telco Debate
    • |
    • Follow
    • |
    • Subscribe
  • |
  • More
  • Webcasts
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Great Telco Debate
  • |
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • |
    • Subscribe
    • |
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Sign In Register Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Sign In
    • Register
  • Search

Small Cells

Small Cells

Small Cell Forum aims to help defrag 5G: too many participants going in too many directions

Ian Scales
By Ian Scales

Oct 6, 2016

via Flickr © nicephotog (CC BY-SA 2.0)

via Flickr © nicephotog (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Small Cell Forum (SCF) is worried about 5G fragmentation and says it intends to combat it as the industry starts bringing together the enabling technologies.  According to  SCF Chair David Orloff fragmentation is the effort’s single biggest risk. He claims proprietary and pre-standard efforts, and closed-doors partnerships, threaten the creation of a unified platform that all parties will be able to use.

“The issue is that quite a number of operators and vendors are taking the journey to 5G in different ways,” David told me. “Everyone is tackling this from their own perspectives with pre-standard technology, so you have the potential for the industry participants to diverge away from each other. If they do we’ll end up with everybody doing something different.”

David sees a particular problem with network splitting via SDN and NFV which some players see as a big assist in enabling network operators to engineer different quality levels and to groom different traffic types across the network. “There are too  many vendors looking to split the layers up in different places,” he says. “That’s going to make it very difficult for operators. “

“It’s a really critical that issues like virtualisation and how the layers are separated is made the most efficient we can manage to aid  backhauling.” he said.

Small Cell Forum recently hosted its first dedicated 5G vendor and operator workshop, bringing together leading industry players to progress the enabling technologies for next generation networks. Workshop participants included AT&T, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Microsemi, Nokia, Parallel Wireless, SpiderCloud and Vodafone. The session was led by outgoing SCF chair Alan Law of Vodafone and  David Orloff of AT&T as chair-designate.

“The best route to protect operators from fragmentation is to achieve harmony in the higher layers of the network  with common specs and APIs to enable unified network management, orchestration, security and applications,” said Alan Law, “whatever the underlying access network.”

“The value of the Small Cell Forum is that we’re looking at things like implementations, that the standards bodies aren’t looking at, “ David told me. “We’re looking to pull everybody together - we won’t get it right from the get go but we can look forward and see what they’re doing in the standards bodies and drive the implementation and the services and business models and all of those things.

“Can we start now to formulate all those so that it all meets the end goal of the standards bodies? I think the answer is, for the most part, yes.”

Related Topics
  • 4G LTE,
  • Access Evolution,
  • Analysis & Opinion,
  • News,
  • NFV,
  • Small Cells

More Like This

Access Evolution

FCC modernizes siting rule for small hub and relay wireless antennas

Jan 7, 2021

5G

ASE, Chunghwa Telecom and Qualcomm team up to build the world's first 5G mmWave private network smart factory

Dec 16, 2020

Access Evolution

Private cellular is riding high for a perfect storm of reasons

Nov 25, 2020

Open RAN

CommScope's Role in the Open RAN Market

Nov 16, 2020

Digital Platforms & Services

What’s up with… WhatsApp in India, American Tower, Cellnex, Nokia

Nov 6, 2020

Email Newsletters

Stay up to date with the latest industry developments: sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox – including our daily news briefing and weekly wrap.

Subscribe

Top Picks

Highlights of our content from across TelecomTV today

1:4:29

Great Telco Debate: Live Debate – Day 2 (On-demand)

1:18:20

Great Telco Debate: Live Debate – Day 3 (On-demand)

43:08

Developing an ecosystem for vRAN

1:5:11

Great Telco Debate: Live Debate – Day 1 (On-demand)

  • TelecomTV
  • Decisive Media

TelecomTV is produced by the team at Decisive Media

Menu
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
 
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Events
  • About Us
Our Brands
  • TelecomTV Tracker
  • TelecomTV Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • The Great Telco Debate
Get In Touch
[email protected]
+44 (0) 207 448 1070

Request a Media Pack

Follow
  • © Decisive Media Limited 2021. All rights reserved. All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder(s).
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Legal Notices