Partner content: This new set of network capabilities will help communications service providers achieve more open, high-performing, programmable networks
5G Advanced is the new set of network capabilities that will help communications service providers (CSPs) achieve their goal of high-performing programmable networks, with more openness. This will ensure consistent and superior user experience at any time and place, and influence network behaviour to achieve a desired outcome.
Ericsson offers 5G Advanced radio access network (RAN) software solutions that will support customer business objectives in areas like performance, sustainability, automation and new services. It will incentivise service providers to accelerate deployment and uptake of 5G standalone (also known as 5G SA or SA) and empower service providers to deliver differentiated connectivity that will further monetise 5G.
- CSPs have built strong networks in the first phase of 5G, which improved user experience, supported new use cases and helped grow Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) business.
- CSPs have made substantial investments in building 5G networks in terms of spectrum, mid-band expansion, nationwide coverage, traffic steering and optimisation and introduction of new radio (NR) standalone.
- Ericsson’s view is that while the industry has yet to realise the full business potential of this investment – 5G is still on track to fulfill its promise. Balancing this, many CSPs have yet to progress to a standalone architecture and make the network fully ready for 5G Advanced and take the technology to the next level.
- Moving towards enabling differentiated connectivity in the industry is crucial to offering new services developed directly by ecosystems around CSPs.
- With Ericsson 5G Advanced, our customers will get the RAN software, to support them to transform their 5G networks into high-performing programmable networks that can meet specific business goals such as increasing revenue, reducing operational costs, leading in performance, and setting apart user experience.
- Benefitting from increasingly open architectures, AI coupled with automation and intent-driven networks, Ericsson 5G Advanced can help translate business objectives into RAN performance and sustainability. Service-aware RAN software also offers different user experience levels that can be measured and compared with service level agreements (SLAs).
- Ericsson 5G Advanced software includes 9 software subscriptions: Outdoor Positioning, RAN Differentiated Connectivity, Mission Critical Services, RedCap (reduced capability), Critical IoT, Energy Efficiency and Management, Premium Network Performance, Device Battery Performance and Real-time AI-powered Automation
The path towards high-performing programmable networks
The goal is to ensure consistent and superior user experience and influence network behavior to achieve desired outcomes. For that new transformative technologies come into play: intent-driven networks, AI-powered RAN and service-aware RAN.
• Intent-driven networks will let CSPs interpret customer objectives – known as intents – and perform RAN actions to meet those objectives. It will simplify the complex processes and let CSPs communicate with the system more easily – CSPs will say “what they want”, not “how”.
• AI-powered RAN, where both AI and automation will play a crucial role in realising intent-driven networks, enabling RAN to understand the intents, process vast amounts of data and make intelligent decisions in real time. Real-time processing is essential for 5G Advanced, as we will bring AI-nativeness directly into our RAN Compute and solve the problems with real-time information for maximum network performance and energy efficiency.
• Service-aware RAN will enable rapid scaling of new use cases and customer needs, by being able to adapt to the connectivity requirements of different services and ensuring that RAN can adjust in real time to fulfil service requirements and provide observability to support proof of delivery for each service
Implementing a software-defined RAN
5G Advanced enables us to move from building powerful networks to adding defined software. This means a network that lets us make the most of our investment and offer new services, create differentiated connectivity for new sectors, and add more services on top of that. It will also bring AI into the networks, which will greatly impact how we do things, from making individual features more efficient to optimising and coordinating parameters based on outcomes and intents rather than scripts. This is a change in how you build, operate, and run your network.
To allow our customers flexibility in their network evolution, Ericsson has introduced seven new software subscriptions to complement the already launched RedCap and Critical IoT.
The new 5G Advanced software capabilities will be used to deliver value to our customers in the three following areas: generate revenue, reduce cost and enhance user experience.
Diagram shows Ericsson 5G Advanced RAN portfolio: implementing a software-defined RAN
With all these elements coming together, Ericsson 5G RAN Advanced gives service providers full freedom of choice to address their business needs.
Define your path to highperforming programmable networks
Revenue focus – differentiated connectivity and new service
The goal here is to expand net sales, and Ericsson believes that the path of enabling differentiated connectivity and launching additional new services, like RedCap on top, is the right way. This path is about transforming networks dimensioned for best-effort mobile broadband (MBB) to ones that can provide differentiated connectivity and new services with consistent performance levels and real-time observability. It is vital to change the way service providers can increase the value of connectivity and offer innovative services to consumer, enterprise and to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT).
Cost focus – optimising energy consumption and driving automation with AI
CSPs are very concerned about how much energy they use and how much they affect the environment, and they want to greatly reduce their carbon emissions. Also, it is important to balance the use of advanced energy-saving tools with the intent of user experience, using existing solutions like Automated Energy Saver. AI, automation introduction, and the ability to control intents has the potential to tremendously improve networks in terms of moving from scripted operations or manual configurations into a more automated approach happening in real-time everywhere. Embedding AI in real-time automation adds a very powerful and capable tool to work on the problems at hand for each CSP.
User experience focus – consistent and premium performance
Previously there has been a big focus on single-benchmark performance, but in the long term what really matters for a large set of users is a lower level of volatility in the perceived performance levels throughout the network. The focus is still on increasing capacity networkwide, improving spectral efficiency and maximising the return on investment of newly added spectrum like mid-band, to improve the user experience. The new paradigm is to transform service providers´ networks, designed to optimise cell capacity from the lowest level to a network where performance solutions are offered to each user group for each session, based on defined service provider intents. In short, it is about to unlock additional capacity in most loaded scenarios without adding extra sites, stretch flagship device performance and offer more deployment flexibilities for most technical demanding scenarios. It is also vital to enhance users’ 5G experience by targeting improved battery performance for any 5G device, including smartphones, wearables, AR/VR glasses
Join the journey towards high-performing programmable networks together with Ericsson
For further information: Ericsson 5G Advanced – Explore the latest solutions
Detailed guide can be downloaded from here: ericsson-5g-advanced-guide.pdf