As the talk of AI (artificial intelligence) rages on among consumers and within a host of vertical industries, many sectors know delivering on the promise of AI will take some work. In order to make the future of AI sustainable, we must consider the foundational technology and the connectivity to spur this along. Certainly, 5G comes into this conversation in a big way.
GSMA Intelligence suggests 5G connections are expected to represent 51% of mobile connections by 2029, rising to 56% by the end of the decade. 5G has been the fastest mobile generation rollout to date, surpassing one billion connections at the end of 2022, rising to 1.6 billion connections as 2023 came a close, and is anticipated to reach a whopping 5.5 billion by the time 2030 rolls around.
Certainly, this comes with its own set of challenges. In a whitepaper released in January, 5G Americas’ suggests 5G-Advanced and 6G networks will need additional spectrum to ensure the successful deployment of future mobile networks. 5G Americas emphasizes identifying new spectrum integral to a U.S. National Spectrum Strategy pipeline, ensuring rapid commercialization, and sustained technological leadership.
In an effort to address many of the challenges and to move the needle forward with all the connectivity in general, the last week in February, thousands of people joined together in Barcelona to talk about the future of connectivity at MWC Barcelona 2024. While the announcements spanned from consumer to business, the key takeaway is that AI is here—and 5G will enable it. Let’s take a closer look at this trend.
As one example, TELUS partnered with Samsung to build a 5G virtualized RAN, open RAN network in Canada. With this, the companies are also expanding their collaboration from greenfield (new builds) to brownfield (existing infrastructure) deployments. With an Open RAN, TELUS can use components from different manufacturers that best meet its needs, while a virtualized radio access network allows the use of software instead of hardware.
As another case, Intel made a number of announcements from the event. The company, in collaboration with 5G core software suppliers, previewed its next-gen Intel Xeon processor for 5G core, code-named Sierra Forest, demonstrating a 2.7 times performance per rack improvement. This demonstrates how the company is focused on empowering industries to further modernize and monetize 5G, edge and enterprise infrastructures and investments, and to take advantage of bringing AI Everywhere.
While connectivity is important, so too is sustainability. Greenerwave announced version 2.0 of its reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Based on a cheaper and more energy-efficient new component, this version is set to revolutionize the 5G market by promising a ten-fold reduction in energy consumption and drastically lower costs.
Certainly, these are only a few examples. The event was a bevy of new announcements and demonstrations of how connectivity continues to evolve for many vertical markets.
Looking to the future, Spirent’s 5G report suggests we will see intense focus on GPUs and other back-end infrastructure in 2024 for large AI learning and inferencing clusters. We will also see investment in faster interconnect technologies to enable it. Spirent also expects Ethernet to dominate AI front-end network designs, with initially 400G and then 800G adoption to grow in the coming years.
The future is bright with artificial intelligence—but only if we have the foundational components to connect and manage all the data. We must keep this in mind as we continue into 2024 and beyond.
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