Telecommunication companies in New Zealand are currently implementing ‘non-standalone’ 5G – while networks have been updated to 5G, data centres and network cores are still running on legacy, non-5G systems, which are dependent on 4G infrastructure. To achieve standalone 5G, data centres and core mobile networks need to be upgraded and deployed on a cloud-native platform. Existing mobile networks run out of a centralised data centre have relatively static use-cases and are complex to customise.
A 5G standalone network is ‘cloud native’, meaning that it is fully virtualised, can run on any cloud service, is designed with a microservices approach and architected to address evolving customer needs in a scalable way, while also offering inherent resilience. This creates flexibility in an end-to-end 5G solution and allows users of the network to realise the full range of benefits of a standalone 5G network – including low latency, and advanced capabilities such as network slicing, private networks, and multi access edge computing.
In this panel, the NZ pioneers of 5G standalone trials Spark New Zealand, Red Hat, Ericsson, Mavenir and AWS discuss the learnings and the opportunities from the successful trials to date, and what the potential is for 5G standalone networks in NZ.
Michael Molony – Head of Mobile Core Networks, Spark NZ