Saturday 3 April 2021

Transition to Infrastructure 2.0

Infrastructure can mean different things to different people in different industries. We tried to explain what it means in the telecoms industry in one of our tutorials here.

When it comes to Infrastructure 2.0, there are articles dating back years. Couple of examples here and here. Back in those days we were talking more about virtualization while today we are talking about containerization and cloudification. We have some introductory presentations on Cloud Native here.

I have heard Qualcomm speakers talk about Infrastructure 2.0 but what does it mean from their point of view? Here is what Cristiano R. Amon, President & CEO-Elect of Qualcomm meant according to RCR Wireless

Infrastructure 2.0 seeks to address the fact that existing core network infrastructure is limited in its ability to handle the highly virtualized network models that the industry is moving toward.

For instance, there has been some concern for awhile now around how data center virtualization will impact existing enterprise networking models.

At the CTIA event, Amon explained that 5G will be revolutionary, creating new industries, use cases, services and network models. However, a network capable of doing all that 5G promises requires “infrastructure like we’ve never seen.”

“It needs to be dense, high-performance, cost-effective and power-efficient for both indoors and outdoors, and support public and private networks with a scalable and flexible networking equipment for diverse deployments across multiple industries and use cases,” he continued. “This modern 5G network is driving a shift towards virtualized radio access solutions or vRAN.”

For further context, in a previous conversation with RCR Wireless News, Amon discussed how this push towards virtualization and openness is a potential vector of disruption to traditional network equipment providers, and this disruption is what will lead to Infrastructure 2.0.

“I believe that vRAN and Open RAN creates a huge opportunity for some of the network equipment providers that will lead the transition in what Infrastructure 2.0 is,” he said, adding that incumbents could “take a leading role in the software that will run in those networks and will provide feature parity between the existing systems and the new systems.”

With the announcement of Qualcomm 5G RAN platforms, we will probably seem them talking a lot more about Infrastructure 2.0

Related Posts:

No comments:

Post a Comment