The promise of 5G has yet to come true, but it's too soon to declare it a failure. DataBank CEO Raul K. Martynek discusses that true 5G is being realized through mobile edge computing, with the data center at the heart of it.

All the major mobile carriers are touting their ability to offer 5G access to wireless networks across the United States. At the same time, consumers and businesses are eagerly awaiting the next killer applications that will enable digital processes to achieve quantum leaps in performance and efficiency. However, true 5G speed and capabilities also depend on mobile edge computing. Mobile edge computing is all about wireless carriers enabling more responsive applications on their networks, while the data center is at the heart of enabling the integration of applications and network interfaces.

Consider multiplayer games. If operators cannot keep packets locally (that is, at the metro level), it will be impossible to provide equal performance to all users. If one person uses a Verizon device and another uses an AT&T device, the two packet streams could be peered hundreds of miles away, causing jitter and latency that would discourage gamers everywhere. Likewise, if the gaming software stack is located 1,500 miles away in a core data center market, performance won't match the console experience at home. Both the network and the application's compute and storage need to be local. The location will take place within an edge data center and leverage the 5G capabilities of mobile edge computing.

Game developers need 5G wireless networks to save data packets between multiple phones on different networks in the same metropolitan area so that the network and apps work together and understand each other. Then, since the network and application stacks are developed by different parties, the exchange needs to take place in multi-tenant edge data centers that allow for interconnection, security, carrier neutrality, and scalability. Only in this way can video games provide users with an equal and enjoyable experience and utilize wireless networks to achieve ubiquitous coverage.

Here's how infrastructure improvements must work.

Four key components of 5G

In reality, it will be a few years before 5G delivers on the promise of this experience. While carriers are making progress, they still have a lot of work to do to deploy true "standalone" 5G networks. Achieving this requires network evolution of four key components:

1. Integrate a full-frequency, three-band "layer cake" from the tower, small cell, or rooftop RF distribution all the way to the device. This weaves together low, mid and high-band frequencies that will deliver 5G's ultra-wide broadband (UWB) and ultra-low latency (ULL); operators are already 25% of the way there.

2. Re-architect the network core from 4G to 5G virtualization. This will change the core from a centralized design to an architecture where a relatively small number of control points are broken down into dozens of user plane locations and applications can access the network at a more local level.

3. Virtualize the radio access network (cRAN or vRAN) so that base stations within an area can pool resources to handle peak user activity and improve handover between cells. This eliminates the need to size each macro site for peak activity, which is the case with 4G.

4. Leverage Open Network Components, where key network functions are "virtualized" as software running on commodity hardware and allowing applications to plug directly into the network. This approach enables mobile users to access edge computing at cRAN base station locations in closer proximity and performs like the Internet in terms of aggregation points.

Once operators have all four components and migrate customers from 4G frequencies to 5G layer cake bands, the real promise of 5G can be delivered through wireless networks that can support millions of IPs per cell address (large-scale machine-to-machine communication), while providing users with 1 gigabit speed (ultra-wide broadband), latency below 10 milliseconds (ultra-low latency communication), and very low jitter.

Using this new wireless network topology, true multi-access edge computing (MEC) can be achieved, where network and application stacks can come together and programmatically interact. This is what mobile edge computing is all about, enabling the ultimate user experience in gaming, e-retail, financial transactions, or any mobile interaction you can imagine.

Data Centers Play a Key Role in Mobile Edge Computing

True 5G is expensive and opens a new window - $100 billion in capex. Even if operators make the investments required for 5G, they will still need an ecosystem of software developers, SaaS companies, and hardware manufacturers to create next-generation applications and devices that can effectively take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of 5G networks.

This ecosystem will require physical locations where interactions take place, similar to how apps and the web are combined today. These locations are, and will be, multi-tenant edge data centers located in dozens of metropolitan areas. These edge data centers and portals need to be connected to 5G networks to create mobile edge computing infrastructure for developing, deploying, and scaling low-latency applications.

By definition, 5G and mobile edge computing are separate, but at the end of the day, applications and their data end up in data centers. To bring wireless computing to end users, cloud providers need to leverage data centers in all major U.S. metropolitan areas that can provide the required power density, cooling, security, and interconnectivity.

Fear not: 5G is coming

Dating back to the advent of the commercial internet, every technology cycle has the same pattern. Think about when carriers initially rolled out 4G. Skeptics doubt that any new apps will use up all the new capacity; recall how happy everyone was with a tactile keyboard BlackBerry. Shortly after, smartphones started appearing, and before you knew it, an ecosystem of apps had grown up creating thousands of use cases that people were consuming. A similar generation of applications enabled by 5G will allow operators to recoup their investments, and ten years from now, 5G will have the same impact that 4G has had on society and the business world today.

While everyone is waiting for the next killer app or set of killer apps to take advantage of all the extra bandwidth and ultra-low latency that 5G promises, the internet works pretty well today. Now consider artificial intelligence models for real-time language translation, virtual reality applications for training and navigation, and self-driving cars and drones, and you can start to imagine what the future holds with 5G.

Don't worry, 5G is coming. No doubt it will have an impact. Unlike 4G and 3G, when they designed 5G, they considered how the network, data and applications all need to be connected. This is why 5G is different and more powerful than previous wireless architectures. 5G, and more importantly, as network bandwidth and latency speeds increase and networks are built and connected at the application layer, applications that take advantage of 5G will become popular. These connections will be enabled in multi-tenant edge data centers in a number of metro markets. Today's data centers will continue to expand, and the convergence of cloud and networking will unleash a new generation of applications and use cases.