5G Fixed Wireless Access Testing

For the next wave of gaming, top gaming platforms, service providers and hyperscalers will invest over $50 billion into games, metaverses and technologies. Video quality will quadruple data rates. A vast increase in simultaneous active gamers will require 300 megabytes per hour, far exceeding today’s rates. This drastically expanded user adoption presents use cases that will redefine networking requirements – challenging the promises of 5G, which is still rolling out. Companies will turn to multi-access edge computing (MEC) to deliver the low latency and high throughput demands gaming consumers will need for enhanced user experience.

To win in the marketplace, communication service providers (CSPs) need to answer several questions as they bring their 5G offerings into production. Examples include: How is my user’s experience vs. competitors? Where must I improve to be competitive? Where can I get unbiased evidence of my differentiators for marketing purposes? Have we been successful in our differentiation strategy? How is my spectrum strategy progressing relative to our competitors?

Communication services providers (CSPs) launching new services must contend with the challenge of disaggregation in 5G. Once the separate components are brought together, will the new 5G network really work and deliver a superior user quality of experience (QoE)? The need to assure that nothing is ‘broken’ in the process is essential. The service planned must be the one delivered. Each component of 5G has its own requirements for validation.

Private networks are taking on greater importance in vertical-specific enterprise uses cases such as manufacturing, mining, transport logistics, and finance, which currently represent over 80 percent of the private networking market. These diverse enterprises represent diverse ecosystems, technologies, and environments. Major network equipment manufacturers, cloud providers, system integrators, and operators are intent on servicing the needs of these verticals with collaborative offerings aimed at making private networks easy to order, deploy, manage, and scale.

Hyperscalers and operators offering public or private clouds must ensure three delivery phases are validated for success throughout the solution lifecycle. They are: launch, optimization and operation, with testing and validation requirements extending across all phases.

SPs need unbiased industry-recognized benchmarking to validate their mobile network’s performance for latency, optimal gaming experience and to identify areas for service optimization.