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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Friday, May 31, 2024
5G technologies are gaining popularity in branch office connectivity due to their high speeds and low latency, enabling businesses to utilize them for real-time and latency-sensitive unified communications.
Fremont, CA: 5G is revolutionizing the WAN services market with faster data speeds, low latency, and network segmentation. However, deployment is limited due to COVID-19 and supply chain issues, and 6G technologies are expected to hit the commercial market by 2030.
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What Part Might SD-WAN Play In 5G Networks?
High-speed 5G services combined with SD-WAN improve reliability, rapid provisioning, and high-speed bandwidth for distributed organizations. This new WAN architecture benefits large-scale enterprises with hybrid or permanent work-from-home settings, connecting to private data centers, public clouds, or remote network infrastructure. SD-WAN introduces new wireless service providers, IoT, AI, and data analysis mechanisms, enabling trend identification, process streamlining, and avoiding network congestion and outages.
The Advantages of Utilizing 5G and SD-WAN Jointly
SD-WAN is a technology that improves internet connection security and reliability by managing traffic over multiple WAN links. It offers higher bandwidth capacity and is constantly evolving. Combining 5G with SD-WAN offers benefits like easy link provisioning, connectivity diversity, link redundancy, quality of service, active-active connections, better application performance, security, visibility, traffic management, support for edge computing environments, and increased functionality at reasonable costs.
Downsides of 5G and SD-WAN
Organizations face challenges in adopting 5G wireless technologies for SD-WAN connectivity, including carrier availability and cost. Availability is a concern as carriers struggle to meet rollout timeline goals, leading some businesses to explore alternative options. Signal strength issues can result in less desirable performance due to building obstructions, requiring external antenna retrofitting. The higher cost of 5G technology initially offsets this, but competition among carriers may subside this obstacle.
Recommendations for IT Leaders
SD-WAN deployments often use cellular wireless as a backup circuit when primary wired connections suffer from performance degradation or outages. With 5G services becoming widely available and vendors offering attractive unlimited data plans, wireless will become a strong alternative for SD-WAN connectivity. IT leaders should consider integrating 5G for pop-up or temporary locations into a primary circuit options package along with MPLS and internet broadband.
What's Next For 5G And SD-WAN?
5G technologies are gaining popularity in branch office connectivity due to their high speeds and low latency, enabling businesses to utilize them for real-time and latency-sensitive unified communications. Remote offices can use 5G services as their primary connectivity link, with wired mediums used for backups or offloading non-latency-sensitive data. 5G SD-WAN combinations are increasingly used in mobile pop-up business connectivity.
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