The 5G Infrastructure Market: Voice Over 5G (Vo5G) and Real-Time Ultra-High Definition Vo5G-Enabled Immersive Application Driven Market Outlook and Forecasts 2019-2024

5G Infrastructure will Support Transformational Apps and Services, Providing a Dramatically Enhanced User Experience, and Creating Entirely New Business Models

Fifth Generation (5G) cellular will enable many new advanced functions such as significantly greater capacity, dramatically lower latency, and optimized support for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. This will support enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable communications, and massive IoT deployment. 5G will also introduce the ability to implement network slicing for dynamic network allocation, enforceable SLA/QoE, and network as a service. Leading communication service providers will leverage their investment in Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to optimize network slice allocation as well as overall network management and 5G orchestration.

An essential component of 5G networks, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) facilitates optimization of fifth generation network resources including focusing communications and computational capacity where it is needed the most. Without MEC, 5G would continue to rely upon back-haul to centralized cloud resource for storage and computing, diminishing much of the otherwise positive impact of latency reduction enabled by 5G. In other words, MEC enables users and devices to store/access much higher volumes of data by way of direct access to the Internet rather than relying upon transport through the core of cellular networks. 

Some big changes are coming to the Radio Access Network (RAN) portion of cellular networks with the “New Radio” (5GNR) portion of 5G as 5GNR will use millimeter wave (mmWave) radio propagation. LTE and prior stages of cellular radio use centimeter to meter-sized waves and lower frequencies. Implementation of mmWave based radio will enable fiber-like performance with great capacity, low cost per bit, and ultra-low latency required to support mission-critical services ranging from public safety applications to robotics. Additional application areas include industrial automation, haptic Internet and virtual reality. 

While 5G deployment is leveraging some new frequency bands and will entail a 10 to 100 times expansion of the number of cells, much of it will NOT be mmWave. Instead, a big part of 5G is driven by the evolution of 4G/LTE (Long Term Evolution standard). In fact, technology improvements for LTE are ongoing as it will continue to be relied upon for many applications and services for a long time.  Accordingly, vendors to continue to optimize LTE capabilities such as the improved uplink capacity to support video and wireless communication to cloud-based applications.  LTE adoption will continue at a fast pace with many innovations overlapping with 5G operations.

IoT solutions will benefit greatly from the implementation of 5G as cellular providers deploy Low Power WAN (LPWAN) IoT network capabilities. Initial deployments of IoT LPWANs have been non-cellular solutions based on proprietary technologies.  However, the author sees emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) assuming a dominant role for certain IoT applications. We see many industry verticals willing to pay a premium over non-cellular LPWAN, enhanced flexibility, and improved capabilities associated with IoT on 5G networks.   The use of 5G for Industrial IoT (IIoT) networks in particular will be of great importance to enterprise IIoT in certain industry verticals such as agriculture, logistics, and manufacturing.

In terms of voice services and voice-enabled applications, 5G will usher new architectures into carrier networks enabling many new advanced capabilities including Voice over 5G (Vo5G), which will support voice/audio as a key component of communications for a wide variety of apps and services for many consumer, enterprise, and industrial solutions. Vo5G will utilize video or voice over NR infrastructure in coordination with voice or video over eLTE, EPS fall-back, and RAT fall-back. However, the first phase of cellular voice leverages VoeLTE to route voice calls but offering enhanced and robust solutions over 5G NR require implementation of EPS FB and RAT FB. The 5G NR solution cannot represent all voice or video call without the technical backbone of EPS FB and RAT FB.

A critically important part of the core 5G network infrastructure is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which represents a framework composed of computing and telecom architecture elements intended for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) based multimedia services with quality of service over multiple access networks from a common core. IMS provides multimedia session control across multiple access networks with standardized quality of service control. It enables an operator to have a common ‘core’ across all its networks for communication services and provides a relatively open environment for value added communication services. It also provides a framework for Voice over LTE (VoLTE) for high definition voice and Voice over 5G (Vo5G) for ultra-high definition voice communications.

IMS is not economically viable if the goal is simply to replicate existing services in a new architecture. The payoff of IMS is to develop and introduce new value-added services for incremental revenue at a lower cost per subscriber. The author sees an important portion of those VAS applications being ultra-high definition voice-enabled next-generation apps such as virtual reality. In addition, we see emerging technologies, such as the haptic Internet and robotic teleoperation will become commonplace thanks to 5G infrastructure.

5G radio infrastructure covered in this report includes Distributed Macrocell (5G Base Stations), Small Cells (Microcell, Femtocell, and Picocell), RRHs (Remote Radio Heads), C-RAN BBUs (Baseband Units) and Distributed Antenna System (DAS) equipment. IMS infrastructure covered in this report includes Home Subscriber Server (HSS), User Profile Server Function (UPSF), Breakout Gateway Control Function (BGCF), Media Gateway Controller Function (MGCF), and Media Resource Function (MRF).

This report assesses the 5G infrastructure market driven by Vo5G, Real-time Communications, and Immersive Applications. The report assesses leading companies and strategies, use cases, and applications. The report evaluates infrastructure and supporting technologies with analysis and market sizing from 2019 through 2024. Accordingly, the report includes detailed 5g infrastructure market forecasts for all major equipment, application, and industry segments for the 2019 to 2024 period.

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