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Forbes Column
October 20, 2020 Anyone who follows the 5G market even casually, knows that chip maker Qualcomm is a critical player. Most people, however, don’t know much about the company’s efforts in 5G infrastructure equipment. After all, Qualcomm is best known for its Snapdragon line of SOCs (system on chip) and its modem chips—as well as the intellectual property that’s at the heart of so many telecommunications industry innovations. In fact, most of the latest 5G phones released in the US—including Apple’s new iPhone 12 line—use Qualcomm’s X55 modem for their 5G connectivity. At its virtual 5G Summit event this week, the company focused renewed efforts on the network infrastructure market for 5G. Specifically, it released the details of a new platform of chips designed to take advantage of the growing interest in virtualized and Open RAN architectures that has arisen alongside the transition to 5G. Qualcomm already makes and sells chips intended for 5G small cells, but with these latest platforms, the company is hoping to extend its reach into the larger macro cell market as well. Technically, 5G networks don’t require virtualized networks, nor do they demand the type of open standard interconnect technologies associated with Open RAN. However, because some of the most important applications for 5G are expected to revolve around more high-powered computing applications within the network, interest in creating new ways to build cellular network architectures has been growing. Essentially, you could argue that network operators want to be able to take advantage of the types of standardized open computing architectures that the major cloud computing companies have been building for themselves over the last decade or so, and the transition to 5G has provided the perfect opportunity. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have important advancements in software-defined network platforms occurring at the same time. Toss in the geopolitical tensions around a major network infrastructure provider like Huawei, stir in the concern about the increasingly limited choices of traditional network equipment makers, and you have the perfect recipe for creating new ways to design network architectures. As part of the move towards building cellular networks that leverage traditional x86 or Arm-based server hardware along with the array of different software platforms from companies like Cisco, Microsoft (see “Microsoft Purchase Of Affirmed Networks Highlights 5G Focus Shifting To Infrastructure” for more) and Mavenir, there’s also been a growing recognition that networks can be operated and built in different ways. Specifically, we’ve seen the ability to run the many different network functions that process data packets passing through the network in a manner that’s similar to how multiple workloads run on a single server—through the process of virtualization. The ability to do network function virtualization (NFV) is a key capability that will allow the more advanced applications promised for 5G—as well as handling the greatly increased amount of data that some of them may require—in a more efficient manner. Initially, these types of efforts were primarily focused on the core network portion of cellular networks, but more recently, we’ve seen this type of virtualization happening in the RAN (Radio Access Network) as well—hence vRAN. As network designs are rethought, there’s also been the awareness that certain functions that used to be housed in a single piece of equipment or restricted to proprietary systems from a single vendor could be taken apart, or disaggregated, into multiple components for additional flexibility and choice. To make this concept feasible, however, requires the ability to define and use standard interfaces that connect these components—thus Open RAN. Enter the new Qualcomm RAN components. The company announced three variations at its 5G Summit: a Radio Unit Platform (specifically for the RU, or radio unit in a disaggregated or split network architecture), a Distributed Unit Platform (optimized for the DU, or distributed unit in a disaggregated network), and a Distributed Radio Unit Platform for designs that maintain the traditional structure of an RU and a DU in the same box. All three incorporate Qualcomm’s modem and RF technology and offer support for both sub-6 and millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to provide the widest degree of options when they get deployed. In addition, these new chips—which won’t be available until sometime in 2022—can function as accelerators alongside traditional CPUs (much like FPGAs often do in today’s network equipment) and speed up network functions. The goal is to allow network equipment vendors and carriers to be able to build a variety of different open standards-based 5G network-optimized infrastructure components. While the concepts aren’t as sexy as the latest smartphones and the timelines for building them are much longer—hence the early introduction—the potential applications that might be enabled by these new Qualcomm chips could prove to be even more important than their other more well-known parts. Now that we’re past the initial debut of 5G service, it’s time to start thinking ahead to the new and, in some cases, still yet-to-be-invented applications that the new network standard is supposed to enable. Driving the creation of a more flexible, more efficient, more powerful, and more open set of network infrastructure equipment is an important step in that direction. Disclosure: TECHnalysis Research is a tech industry market research and consulting firm and, like all companies in that field, works with many technology vendors as clients, some of whom may be listed in this article. Here’s a link to the original column: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobodonnell/2020/10/20/qualcomm-extends-reach-into-5g-infrastructure/ Forbes columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community.
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