The race to 5G is intensifying as exemplified by a number of public announcements made by leading mobile operators. However, deeper conversations with service providers yield a very simple but important question. How will we make the investments in 5G upgrades profitable?  The bet is that 5G technology will support massively scalable, low-latency-enabled applications that in turn will open up new ecosystems, business models, and creativity across the enterprise and residential markets in every industry.

While industry conversations revolve around these new services, we should not dismiss the fundamental role that the IP network plays in delivering them. The step to make your IP transport network ready for 5G requires some thorough analysis. Don't think of it as simply one more network upgrade-5G brings new demands on your transport network that necessitates new capabilities.

Building a 5G IP transport network with the right attributes will be a strategic asset for service providers as services evolve over the next decade. Let me expand on a few of these critical attributes that leading 5G transport networks need to provide.

Convergence

The days are gone when service providers rolled out multiple transport networks to support different services. A modern transport network is converged and capable of concurrently supporting:

• Fixed and mobile consumer broadband
• Enterprise, small and medium businesses
• Retail and wholesale business models
• Real-time immersive experiences
• IoT connectivity and value-add

To deal with the complexity of transporting multiple services over a converged network, it is essential to simplify the underlay network across network domains. In just a few years, Segment Routing has emerged as the foundational technology to make networks simpler, as it removes protocols (e.g., LDP, RSVP-TE) and becomes more scalable. By 2019, 60% of the top service providers in the world will deploy segment routing in their networks. This frees up the network from maintaining per-flow states while Segment Routing powers a unified xHaul network fabric.

As some legacy RAN protocols (e.g., CPRI) may never go away, the packet-based transport network must also be able to encapsulate and transport them in order to support any fronthaul RAN, midhaul RAN, and backhaul architectures.

Flexibility

With convergence comes the need for flexibility. The transport network must support a wide range of requirements as not every application is the same -some are latency-sensitive, while others are bandwidth-hungry and do not have the same requirements vis-