What could be better, after talking about the pitfalls of cloud-native development, to talk about how cloud-native and 5G are locked in a deadly hype embrace? There are a couple of stories to reference; one that says the 5G emperor has no clothes, and a second that asks whether 5G can really offer an alternative to wireline broadband. It sure looks to me like the media side of the networking space is struggling to get a non-hype vision of 5G but doesn’t quite know what to accept and what to reject. So let’s try to clothe the 5G emperor ourselves.
The first of the stories wants to dress up the 5G theme of faster services to users. The claim is that “In order to run cloud-native applications over 5G, they need advanced features like network slicing, microservices and user plane function (UPF) which are only supported by 5G core networks – not 4G LTE.” That might seem logical on the surface, since cloud-native sort-of-begats microservices, but I don’t think that’s true.
An application that uses a network service uses the features that are visible. Cloud-native applications could, and are, written all the time to run over not only 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) but even 4G, for the simple reason that all most cloud-native applications need is connectivity. In fact, nearly all cloud-native applications run without any “Gs” at all, because they run on wireline broadband.
That’s not all. The UPF feature of 5G is just the on-ramp to the “data network”, which is usually the Internet. Network slicing is invisible to a 5G user except as a means of partitioning a 5G network by class of service or for MVNO operation, neither of which are required for applications to run. Microservices, or lack of them, in 5G Core would be opaque to service users because they’re internal to the implementation. What is true is that any true 5G-specific applications are likely to be edge computing applications, and edge computing might be promoted by the deployment of 5G Core, providing we assume that both 5G Core and 5G NR are feature-hosted in the metro.
But while I disagree with the justification offered, I agree with the conclusion that the 5G emperor is virtually buck naked. That’s the case for one simple reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with the nitty gritty technology. The reason is that you can’t develop a standard to guide the future of application development without a very clear and specific notion of what application you’re trying to encourage.
Let’s imagine a neanderthal community in a lovely valley somewhere in Europe. The community has been slogging through the woods, up and down the valley and adjacent hills, for generations. Then we have, born into the community, a neanderthal standards-writer. He looks at the river and says “if we had locks, boats could move upstream more easily.” Or he says “if we had paved roads, we could move our goods using carts at a much faster pace.” The problem is that neither boats nor carts have been invented, so before either of these admittedly magnificent innovations can be exploited, we’ll likely need millennia of progress to develop what does the exploiting.
The problem with 5G isn’t that there’s no 5G Core, or even that there is one that’s not being exploited. The great majority of 5G users can’t even tell they’re on 5G, much less whether there’s a 5G Core inside whatever it is that they’re on. It’s that all the features of 5G Core were noodled without any vision of utility, so (surprise, surprise!) there is no utility to be had.
OK, so how about the question of using 5G (as fixed wireless access or FWA) for home/business broadband? According to the second article, this is another naked-emperor 5G fable. “If you don’t have access to cable or DSL, a 5G home internet service will likely prove much better than the 4G LTE you may be depending on now. If you have access to an affordable traditional internet service, you may want to think twice before abandoning it for a 5G alternative.” I have to disagree with that one too.
The article points out that there are really two forms of 5G, the millimeter-wave stuff and the traditional mobile-network-spectrum stuff. Depending on which option you have, and which is available to you, the speeds could be anywhere from about 30 Mbps download up to near-gig speeds. Some areas can only get 4G LTE speeds. However, people who have tried it tell me it’s always faster than DSL most say that it’s competitive with most basic cable broadband services, though not as fast as the high-end tier in well-served areas. So 5G FWA, when available, is likely to be quite decent.
Maybe the most important point about 5G FWA’s value is that it’s the fastest-growing home broadband technology. The main reason is that it has the lowest “pass cost” of any broadband delivery option. Pass cost is the cost associated with getting broadband infrastructure to a point where customers can be served if they sign up. Fiber, CATV, or other physical-media technologies require that the operator deploy the media into neighborhoods and then connect to subscribers, and the cost of that initial deployment is significant, and has to be accepted before anyone can sign up and contribute revenue.
Not only is pass cost low for FWA, connect costs are even lower. Nobody has to wire anything to the home to get service. Most FWA installations are plug-and-play, with the customer simply mounting an antenna somewhere suitable and connecting to it. The combination of low pass cost and low connect costs means lower service costs.
Another benefit of this lack of physical media is that it can open broadband competition in areas where anti-competitive practices have closed them. Many residential subdivisions have cut deals with wireline providers (cable companies in particular) that restrict access of other providers in return for the selected provider pre-deploying (and perhaps kicking in some developer dollars). FWA jumps over this and makes a competitive option available.
There is an availability barrier for 5G FWA, just like there is for other home broadband technologies, but the barrier is coming down for more and more users as competing operators (Verizon and T-Mobile in the US, for example) open up more areas. The sweet spot for 5G FWA is the suburbs, where tall buildings aren’t likely to interfere with the signals and where other broadband options can be limited by the pass costs. It’s not unreasonable to believe that 5G FWA will be the top option for home broadband in price and performance in many areas by the end of 2023. That doesn’t sound like a technology in trouble.
Technology coverage these days tends to follow a three-phase trajectory. First, everything is the Last Hope of Civilization As We Know It, hyped to the sky. Then it’s a cesspool of lies, and finally it’s just old news, ignored forevermore. 5G is in the second phase, where stories compete to find new reasons why it’s worthless. It isn’t that, but it’s also not the “everything” that the first step in our 5G trajectory had claimed. What it really is may be hard to determine, though, because once it enters that last phase you’ll never hear anything about it again.