If you want to look at the future of wireless networks, look east!
Operators in Korea and Japan have developed a unique formula to scale wireless networks. In those markets, urban real estate and power is expensive (hence reliance on nuclear energy). The deployment of new sites is long and cumbersome. On the other hand, government policy and regulatory environment allowed operators to deploy extensive fiber networks and, where operators don’t own fiber assets, to lease dark fiber at very competitive rates. Pragmatic operators seized the opportunity to centralise the radio access network in fibre or data centres leaving only remote radios and antennas on site, all the while realizing a 30% – 50% reduction in operational expenditure.
Centralisation paves the path to capital cost savings brought about by virtualisation of the baseband. Virtualised baseband relies on general purpose processors instead of dedicated silicon to run the air interface. Using commercial servers leverages the IT industry cost curve. The processing is pooled which leads to further cost savings because we do not need to provision for maximum site capacity as is the case in distributed network architecture (as much as 75% less processing is required according to some studies). Wireless operators have embraced virtualisation as witnessed by programs like Domain 2.0 at AT&T and UNICA at Telefonica. The combination of centralised and virtualised baseband results in Cloud RAN which promises to have a disruptive impact on the wireless industry. To illustrate, imagine switching between base station vendors at the click of a button! While this may be a utopian view of Cloud RAN, it helps to imagine the possibilities and power Cloud RAN provides.
