Ordinary day in 2025
It’s year 2025. A firefighter was dispatched into a 5-storey building rescue operations. Due to earlier dispatched drones, the command and control center enjoys real-time video monitoring and a local ad-hoc mesh network. Still remember the firefighter in the past – with no communication means, indoor visibility beyond barriers and work beyond health limits? The firefighter of 2025 is the opposite. They are equipped with an intelligent helmet, leveraging Augmented Reality to see, navigate and interact beyond barriers. The firefighter is supported by a wearable suit filled with sensors, importantly personal health monitoring, remote 360 degree camera technology for real-time operations management and performing interaction with building sensors inside walls and ceiling cameras. In the future, this all is enabled by Internet of Things (IoT) enhancements, Augmented Reality and most importantly The Reliable and Secure Broadband 5G Network, with seamless indoor, outdoor and low-power sensor mobile communications technologies.
Mission-critical Communication Foundation
This scenario asks for reliable and secure seamless communications networks across indoor and macro environments not just for ordinary people, but also for the Digitised First Line Responders and IoT sensors they'll use in daily life. As we all experience mobile indoor communications challenges today, the tomorrow’s requirements will yet be more stringent acting as the communication foundation. As the technology and requirements evolve, the way we think of and design networks must also change. Often 4G/ 5G network design is based on fulfilling regulator license coverage requirements and managing consumer’s best-effort capacity. It’s not enough!
Future Network Design
In the future, we need to design coverage everywhere, provide seamless multi-technology engineering and meet use case driven network capacity provision. As designers, we need to harden for reliability and security where it makes most sense. In the Digital World, we need to step beyond just serving single customer groups and also care for the Digital ecosystem customers. Fortunately, the network will be powered by Network Slicing capacity virtualisation capabilities to cater for these varying customer demands. In addition, the future design leverages mix use of licensed and unlicensed frequencies and facilitates new network share models whereby operator’s co-lease capacity from each other. It is fair to say, that the traditional network design methods are not feasible due to increased techno-economic complexity – the future asks for process re-engineering, collaboration, automation and most importantly value analysis. The future network design team should be powered by Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics to optimise the value driven by network designers.
Now is the time to prepare for 2025!
lf you’d like to discuss more about the issue, please don't hesitate to contact us and let’s sit down together!
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