Are Legacy Systems Impeding 5G Rollouts?

Data Lag Is No Longer Acceptable —

The FCC recently launched a 5G Fast Plan for nationwide coverage, challenging the private sector to meet this ambition. The Pentagon also recently agreed to share part of the wireless spectrum to help speed up telecom operator rollout in remote rural regions with fewer call towers. However, the rollout has been slower than anticipated, with US 5G coverage lagging behind countries such as South Korea and China. Not only is coverage patchy, but 5G network speeds also vary widely from place to place.

The stakes are high, with research estimating that $13.2 trillion in global economic value will be made possible by 5G in 2035, which will in turn widen the economic gap between early and late adopters. 5G will be fundamental to everything from industrial automation, dense area services, and disaster response, to autonomous transport, smart grids, and massive content streaming services. 

5G is as vital an enabler to the Fourth Industrial Revolution as electricity networks were to the Second Industrial Revolution — which means ensuring comprehensive coverage is now essential. As the post-lockdown economy is reshaped around remote working, this will also produce a greater need for faster in-building connectivity in homes as well as businesses. Ensuring equality of coverage nationwide will be vital to both achieving regional economic equality and expanding the market for telecom operators.

The Legacy Lag

As millimeter waves are short-range and spread out, networks need to be completely redesigned to achieve the required density and range to direct the frequencies at target populations. The small range of the antennae used for beamforming means that achieving full coverage requires many antennae strategically positioned on rooftops, parks, and commercial buildings, to avoid signal interference. Creating complementary networks of antennae capable of reaching the maximum number of households and businesses at the lowest cost is a major logistical challenge. 

Equality of access requires a cost-effective way of ensuring the widest possible coverage at the lowest cost and risk to reach both urban and remote rural populations. Millions of antennae need to be optimally positioned to reach the widest market while avoiding signal obstruction or weather hazards. 

This is rendered even more difficult because the geospatial systems used to map telecoms grids are already struggling to keep pace with fiber deployments, and will be pushed even further to manage the scale of changes needed to deliver ambitious 5G targets. Complex network assets such as 5G antennae are often still represented in a non-interactive 2D format, which means they are often inaccurate or out-of-date. All too often, many operators are still using paper maps. These network maps can be maintained only by specialist cartographers, and are therefore not regularly updated with new information from field workers or digital sensors. 

It’s not unusual to take weeks or months for network field changes to be reflected in a GIS database. One large operator we talked to recently explained that they have around 50,000 jobs in their GIS "as-built update" queue while others have reported as many as 50% of as-builts are incorrect. 

The Data Gap

The consequences are that many operators do not know the location of present and planned networks in relation to all the population centers and services with the poorest signal. The disconnect between data in the field and in the office only increases as telecom grids are now being rapidly expanded and upgraded to extend 5G coverage. A process model based around physical maps and siloed applications cannot fulfill the operational requirements of a telecom company that needs rich, real-time data to meet the complex and costly challenge of nationwide coverage.