5G Won't 'Win the Day' Over Fiber Due to Costs, Say Experts

5G has little chance of replacing fiber in many areas because of the relative cost of wireless, speakers said Thursday during a TelecomTV virtual conference. Speakers agreed fiber builds will continue at a rapid pace globally.

“Wireless will not win the day over fiber because the cost per bit of carrying data over fiber is a fraction of the cost per bit of carrying it over wireless,” said Matthew Hare, CEO of U.K.-based provider Zzoomm. “The great benefit” wireless gives operators is “flexibility and mobility,” he said: “Using your scarce spectrum for fixed applications means you’re not going to monetize it at the same level as if you use it for mobility.” Fiber will continue to carry most data, he said. The demand for fiber is “absolutely enormous,” he said.

Verizon is going “very big” on 5G, but fiber “has the edge on quality,” said Oliver Cantor, associate director-global products. A large portion of traffic “is inevitably going to be carried on fiber,” he said. “I do want to emphasize and fly a small flag for the wireless providers and all of their heavy investments,” he said. “Everywhere you have 5G, you’re going to need a lot of fiber.”

“I would expect Verizon to say that” about 5G, responded Pierre Marty, vice president-international business development at French provider Celeste. Radio networks require antennas to be swapped every three-five years, he said. Costs are high with wireless and “it’s not as reliable as a fixed network,” he said. That weighs against wireless dominance “in the long run,” he said. Almost no one predicts the end of copper networks before 2030, Marty said. “We still have a long way to go to get the job done on fiber.”

“The only people that are complaining that there’s too much fiber are those people who have old networks” fiber is replacing, said Clayton Nash, strategy director of the U.K.’s CityFibre: “New builders are spending their own money. They’re bringing that fiber to new places.”

On a second panel, speakers mostly agreed open radio access networks are the wave of the future. “The telecom industry used to rely on its internal technological view of the world rather than what it delivered to the outside world,” said Chris Lewis, Lewis Insight managing director. “As we evolve toward more software-based networks, we absolutely have to open up the APIs, open up the ecosystem," he said of application programming interfaces.

Graham Wilde, CKH Innovations Opportunities head-5G business development, questioned whether ORAN claims are overblown. Providers need to “maintain a level of control over their network and the other services that they provide,” he said. Being open “may lead to increased complexity and increased costs and make it harder to deliver the kind of services that telcos need to deliver to their business and consumer customers,” he said.

Openness “always played a key role” in the telecom industry, said Franz Seiser, Deutsche Telekom vice president-access disaggregation. “There is simply no alternative” to open networks, he said. Carriers have to control the API, but “there’s no way around … going the next level of opening up our networks, making parts of the network interchangeable,” he said: “By that we can bring in innovative new solutions quickly, and being fast is the rule.”

Carriers worldwide have declining revenue streams, said Boris Maurer, Accenture managing director-Europe communication and media industry. “We need to reinvent what we deliver to our customers,” he said: “We need to become much faster in this industry in adapting to customer needs and to the services that they’re asking for. We need to do that in a more innovative way.” Providers need to get out of their “comfort zone” and “learn to collaborate in new ways, adopt new ways of working,” he said.

This year, about half of network deployments have been virtualized networks, with that expected to grow by more than 80% by 2024, said Renu Navale, general manager of Intel’s Smart Edge Platforms Division. “Open provides flexibility,” said Azhar Sayeed, chief architect at Red Hat: “Open provides scale. Open provides nimbleness and agility.”