5G 'Scaling to Volume Phase,' but Supply-Chain Woes, Labor Crunch Persist

5G deployment is accelerating worldwide, but COVID-19 pandemic challenges still loom, experts said Wednesday during an RCR Wireless webinar. 5G has hit the “scaling to volume phase,” with 2 billion connections expected by 2025, said Sebastien Prieur, group manager-5G transport and RF at Exfo, a testing and analytics company

“We are now at the point where we are moving from the early non-standalone architecture to the real 5G, with the 5G core, with support for lower latency and higher reliability,” Prieur said. “The volume and pace of deployment are really crazy, and the whole ecosystem is under pressure to deliver,” he said.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a slowdown in deploying 5G in the U.S. for about six months, with a rebound last year, Prieur said. “We are in a very strong cycle of investment in both fiber and wireless infrastructure to improve on coverage and capacity,” he said. The 3GPP delayed Release 16 for about three months because of COVID, he said. But there has been “pretty good progress considering the absence of face-to-face meetings in the last two years,” he said.

Supply chain issues are affecting all industries, Prieur said. 5G rollout “hasn’t been too impacted, but we will have to see how the situation will evolve in the next few months,” he said. Labor shortages also loom and should slow deployment, he said. “The workforce is still very scarce,” he said.

Open radio access networks are “evolving with more virtualization, with edge computing,” Prieur said: “Only now the base unit is being split” into the distributed unit (DU) and the centralized unit (CU), but the core and CU “are now fully virtualized and the DU is in some cases running on an off-the-shelf server.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic “it’s not just the smartphone that’s getting a lot of traction onto the network” but also fixed wireless, said Rex Chen, LitePoint director-business development. “We see quite a bit of growth” for fixed 5G “and this will only continue in the forthcoming years,” he said. Another trend is all the major carriers are making “significant” investments in their networks, he said.

Chen also sees continuing movement to ORAN and virtual RAN. Both “can provide economics for the carriers, and really, at the end the benefit is to consumers,” he said: “If the deployment cost of these is lower, the adoption rate of 5G will actually be faster.” ORAN just got started in 2019 “and it’s still a relatively young ecosystem that’s continuing to grow,” he said. Spending on ORAN is small, but “it’s growing pretty steadily year over year, at 50% or even higher compounded growth,” he said. LitePoint predicts carriers will spend the same amount on ORAN by 2025 as they spend on traditional networks, he said.

“One of the things that jumps out” is the volume of spectrum made available for 5G, said Jack Fritz, principal at Deloitte Consulting. “The carriers are actively deploying as much of this as possible,” he said: The low band is getting deployed and dynamic spectrum sharing is “continuing to take hold, so we’re just seeing huge gains in the coverage.”

Deloitte sees potential problems in the supply chain for devices and network gear, and the possibility of worker shortages, Fritz said. People remain “a little more stationary” due to the pandemic, he said. “If people haven’t been moving as much, some of the innovation and some of the needs haven’t been there in the same way as in earlier generations,” he said.

Fritz isn’t surprised carriers are focused on ORAN, because of the potential to cut capital expenditures and address operational challenges. “It’s just a fundamental shift in so many ways,” he said.

Millimeter-wave isn’t playing that large of role yet in 5G, Chapman said. “We haven’t gotten into a situation where we’re running out of spectrum and there is still spectrum in the low- and the mid-bands,” he said. Deployment costs are also higher, he said. Millimeter-wave adoption “will happen, but it will take a couple more years,” he said.