Show Notes
The Internet has long been used for entertainment and shopping, but the pandemic has heightened its importance in our lives making broadband internet access an essential utility like water, gas, and electricity. While the world has made a massive shift toward virtual moving work, school and even grocery shopping home there are still many people who can’t easily get online regularly. This is commonly referred to this as the “digital divide.” Even as fiber continues to be installed and speeds continue to increase from megabits per second to gigabit rates for many – there are still people who must go to a certain place or wait for a certain time to be online, or who will never have the opportunity to do so. According to research from a Pew Research Center study1, there are an estimated 9.7 million students who don’t have reliable high-speed internet and many people who do have access to broadband are choosing not to subscribe. This could be for a myriad of reasons including high costs, lack of urgency and fear of getting online. The U.S. government has been actively looking for solutions to the digital divide. Last year the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) who are poised to spend to spend $20 billion over the next ten years working to close the rural digital divide. Similarly, the 5G Fund for Rural America may spend another $9 billion working on solving the issue as well. As solutions roll out one thing continues to be abundantly clear, 5G can and will play a large part in bridging this gap. Clearly there are a ton of moving parts to the digital divide including the role that Congress and the FCC play, its effect on both rural and urban areas, the prominence of this divide before and after the pandemic and how 5G will play a big role and closing the digital divide. Listen now to understand why the digital divide exists, who is affected by it, and the role 5G and rural broadband play in solving this long-standing national crisis.Networks TechTalk podcast was previously named Recalibrate with Samsung Networks.
More from Networks TechTalk with Samsung
Wireless networks are going through a paradigm shift with the emergence of Open RAN. This new approach to architecting a multi-vendor network fosters innovation, agility, and cost efficiency in deploying and operating 5G networks. More importantly, it serves users better and faster than ever. However, there are mixed opinions in the industry and varied approaches to materializing the vision of Open RAN.
Fixed Wireless Access, or FWA, has emerged as a powerful enabler in the mobile landscape and is one method being used to fulfill the growing user demand for data. FWA is another offering to provide high-speed internet access to homes, businesses, and remote areas without relying on traditional wired connections like fiber or cable lines for the ‘last mile’ of connectivity. The demand for FWA itself among broadband users is growing with analyst firms expecting FWA users to reach 14-18 million in 2027 in the United States.
With much of the world standing on the brink of mainstream 5G usage, operators are looking for ways to extract maximum value from their network investments – essentially trying to figure out how to monetize 5G. Operators have spent the past few years on things like spectrum, working to increase base stations needed for sufficient coverage and capacity, and implementing new software tools that allow for autonomous networks and faster delivery of services and upgrades. Providers are now starting to take advantage of the high-speed, low-latency, and connectivity capacities that 5G brings to the market.
5G is the first wireless technology designed to be energy efficient and sustainable with an industry target of 90% improvement in spectral efficiency compared to 4G. This improvement, in large part, also requires energy efficiency in the equipment. Operators and vendors have devised several features to accomplish this goal including increasing spectrum bands supported in a single radio and Massive MIMO antenna capacity, beamforming, and an increasing the use of high-band frequencies. Samsung works to ensure our product experience at every step contributes to a sustainable world with eco-conscious technology and innovation. Samsung is a pioneer in vRAN, being the first to bring vRAN to market with software driven network functions to make networks more flexible and reduce processing and transmit power. Samsung is also helping to address energy efficiency with Power Amplifiers equipped with a Bias Control, dynamic download MIMO transmit paths, and with its low power, energy saving system-on-a-chip (SoC). With global mobile data traffic rates continuing to rise and applications requiring low-latency proliferating, networks will continue to densify, and the number of cell sites grow exponentially. Despite this, telecommunications industry is committed to finding ways to bring down the amount of power used and lowering our carbon footprint to run our networks. We are all excited to see the power saving techniques and features we’ve discussed today continue to advance around the globe. Watch and listen to this Networks Tech Talk episode to learn more about how Samsung and the telecommunications industry are investing in energy saving innovations and technologies.
Virtual Radio Access Networks, or vRAN, are the future of the radio access side of mobile operators’ networks. vRAN is software that runs on off-the-shelf servers rather than the proprietary, dedicated hardware that mobile network providers have been running for decades.