TCO Benefits of Converged 5G Ready IP Transport
Stimulated by the opportunity for new 5G enabled service offerings, many service
providers around the globe have announced, if not launched, 5G services.
Although 5G technology provides a platform to initiate a myriad of new consumer
and business services, it will also drive new scaling challenges as the number of
devices, their bandwidth and performance demands reach higher expectations.
Many service providers are challenged to find a way to deploy 5G with stalled
growth, mounting competition and regulatory pressures. While the desire to drive
top-line growth with new services, and reduce operating costs through the
adoption of automation, many service providers are sidelined by their inability to
free up budget due to the burden of numerous purpose-built networks. For many
years, service providers have been rolling out purpose-built stand-alone networks
to deliver specific services (mobile, residential or enterprises). These siloed
networks require specialized skills, dedicated resources, unique operational
processes and tools. Delivering services across these network boundaries is
extremely cumbersome and expensive.
To free up budget and resources to implement 5G, service providers need to
converge services onto one transport network to handle the amalgamation of
service offerings. With this converged strategy, service providers can significantly
change the economics and lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) while
benefitting from the latest technology advances to enable service innovation and
velocity.
This paper presents the results of a TCO analysis comparing the economics of a
converged IP/MPLS transport network with more traditional dedicated networks.
The results of the analysis demonstrate significant savings with an overall TCO
savings. of 62%, capital expense (CAPEX) savings of 60%, and operations expense
(OPEX) savings of 66%. The analysis asserts the financial advantages of a
converged future mode of operation and elaborates on the benefits of the higher
price performance of Cisco’s 5G ready routing portfolio and the benefits of
segment routing, network programmability and automation.
KEY FINDINGS
• 5G services drive new
network requirements
for high data rates, low
latency, high reliability,
high security, and
network slicing.
• 5G ready routers must
support SDN, segment
routing, open APIs, and
advanced network
orchestration and
automation.
• Cisco’s 5G ready routers
provide the features and
functions required for
5G while lowering TCO
by 62%, CAPEX by 60%,
and OPEX by 66%.
• Cisco’s 5G Converged
SDN Transport network
provides significant
financial advantages to
change the economics
and lower the TCO of
the 5G transport
network.
2
5G TRANSPORT NETWORKS
As service providers around the world plan, test, and/or roll out new 5G service offerings, the
expectation is that 5G will transform the world with innovative service offerings ranging from enhanced
mobile broadband to critical and massively connected IoT devices. To deliver these new use cases,
mobile transport networks must support higher capacity, lower latency, enterprise class reliability, and
end-to-end security.
A critical part of the 5G architecture is the any-to-any, highly scalable, and flexible transport network to
deliver a vast and diverse set of these 5G mobile, business and residential service offerings. It is critical
that we acknowledge these 5G use cases and their associated demands on the network to thoroughly
understand their impact on the 5G TCO model. Service providers need to ensure that 5G services are
both scalable and profitable. To achieve this goal, they must minimize network TCO while meeting 5G
requirements for scalability, reliability, security, and latency. The following section provides an overview
of these 5G use cases, associated 5G mobile technologies and IP transport network requirements.
5G Use Cases
There is a myriad of 5G use cases, and the expectation is that new applications will evolve at a rapid
pace as the 5G ecosystem develops organically. To address key 5G technical requirements, the 3GPP
standards body has defined three primary use cases that define requirements for thousands of actual
use cases and applications (Table 1).
