Top Challenges Faced By Today’s 5G Companies and Telecom Installers
With every passing day, wireless technologies are becoming an important part of our daily lives. 5G is one of the latest and emerging wireless technologies that has impacted our communications industry to a greater extent. With 5G network, the people associated such as technicians, telecom operators, and most importantly the consumers are benefitted. It has also put a mark on plenty of industries working in different sectors so they can enjoy better network coverage and reliable internet connections.
It is a well-known fact that 5G networks are much faster than any of the previous wireless technologies, but little do we ever talk about the role of fibre optic networks behind these fast data transmissions. Optical fibre systems act as a backbone to the 5G network that carries more data with high-speed transfer over long distances.
5G has a symbiotic relationship with Fibre-to-the-home system. FTTH is the medium of signal transfer through optical fibre cables from the operator’s end to the home or industry. For 5G networks, this system works as a catalyst for moving data at a faster pace than usual. So, whether 5G is a wireless source of transmission, mobile services are always linked to optical fibre infrastructure. In other words, we can say that most of today’s 5G infrastructures are based on the Fibre-to-the-home system.
In the modern era, 5G plays an important role in representing various business and industrial organizations. Its ability to transfer a huge amount of data within no time is helping companies to deploy it for swift data transfers and other network activities. Businesses that work on Artificial intelligence are also getting great benefits with the utilization of 5G wireless networks.
Contrary to its previous versions, 5G offers a lot of benefits to the consumers as well as the industries in the form of faster data speeds and reliable internet connections. With 5G companies, various employment opportunities have also emerged for engineers, telecom installers, operators, and other relevant professionals. But besides these advantages and promising opportunities, deploying a 5G network is not a simple task. In today’s world, 5G companies could face a series of challenges and problems while providing safe and reliable services. For that reason, we have gathered some potential challenges that 5G companies could face:
Spectrum Management:
The biggest challenge that 5G companies are facing today is that 5G networks usually operate on very high frequency i.e., up to 300GHz, and its spectrum bands usually have the capacity of delivering the data with speed 20 times more than the previous wireless technology, 4G LTE. Because of this reason, 5G companies should look out for the higher spectrum bands and research properly before bidding because of its availability and high-cost factors.
Complex Network Coverage:
As we know that 5G network offers greater data transmission speeds and bandwidths, which directly relates to the fact that it requires more hardware such as antennas and base stations to keep up with the operations. In other words, to achieve higher data speeds, companies require bigger, complex, and dense network infrastructures to provide safe and reliable network coverage. Also, the technicians and operators working for the company must be aware of this hardware equipment used in the installation.
Although 5G antennas along with RAN hardware covers considerably less space as compared to the previous 4G macrocells, 5G could require more hardware to provide the same network coverage. Precisely, a standard 4G macro cell covers about 25 square kilometres for the same area for which 5G can take 20 or even more cells along with antennas and RAN hardware.
Investment & Other Costs
The deployment of the 5G network requires a big investment. The network itself could comprise of essential hardware such as fibre optic cables, cell towers, and other necessary equipment, which automatically increase the expenses. The number of hardware equipment and the costs keep on increasing as the network continues to get implemented further by the company. Besides that, the other costs that 5G network encompasses are the costs of network testing equipment for speed, voice, and call tests, along with management and software updates, etc.
Latency Requirements:
Another important challenge that 5G companies usually face is the network’s low-latency requirement to operate. Some of the devices involved in the 5G network operate on very low latency, which means that while working with or without an FTTH system, it allows the delay as low as a single millisecond for unilateral communications. These modern requirements are also followed in some of the real-time applications such as industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, etc.
Device Support:
Due to various challenges caused by spectrum bands along with other technical reasons, the number of devices supporting the 5G wireless network is very less. Possessing these 5G devices can cause heating issues in the network because of the transmission of high spectrum bands, causing a considerable decline in the overall performance. In this way, it is a challenge for the 5G companies to function in an environment surrounded by technical issues that can be caused by the network’s normal operations.
Security Issues:
We need to keep in mind the challenges caused by potential cybersecurity issues that can arise due to the high distribution of 5G networks. For this reason, extra security protocols and monitoring need to be done to avoid security issues at every level.
Protecting user-data and privacy is one of the most important things in any network. With high data transmission speeds and bandwidths, the risks of security issues in the network becomes greater. It is the primary duty of telecom installers and operators to make sure that the network is free from cybersecurity threats.
Conclusively, we can say that 5G companies face a lot of challenges in today’s world. The companies must understand the network by building dense and low-latency architectures to allow swift data transfer with higher bandwidths. They should always look out for the affordability of the network along with the security, maintenance, and other key challenges they could face with the network itself.