By Sandra Rivera
Data is at the heart of an unprecedented $10 trillion 5G market opportunity by 2035. The vast volume of data generated and acted on every day is driving the transformation of communication networks, disrupting industries and inspiring a global ecosystem of technology companies to seize a seemingly limitless market opportunity. Part evolution and all revolution, 5G is accelerating our collective progress and investments to unlock this opportunity.
5G represents the true convergence of computing and communications. With faster speeds, increased bandwidth and improved access, 5G is the next evolution of wireless technology and will deliver a better user experience on existing devices. But more than that, 5G will enable disruptive innovation in the network infrastructure and across all types of smart and connected machines. Today, we are successfully working with our partners to leverage cloud architectures to transform the network and build out the intelligent edge – bringing computing, media processing, artificial intelligence and analytics closer to the end devices. This transformation opens revolutionary opportunities for network operators and service providers to deliver more value from their networks with an entirely new class of consumer and business services that were unattainable on previous architectures.
At Mobile World Congress 2019, we are announcing innovative partnerships and showcasing new products tailored for computing, processing and acceleration at the edge. Our first announcement shares news about customer adoption of our recently announced 10nm system-on-chip wireless access product, code-named Snow Ridge, aimed for initial market introduction by the end of 2019.
The network edge provides new opportunities closer to the point of data creation and consumption. Our recent announcement of the Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) toolkit is designed to foster open collaboration and application innovation at the network and enterprise edge. OpenNESS is an open-source reference software that we are making available to enable the ecosystem to create and deploy new edge applications and services. It helps simplify network complexity for developers and enables secure on-boarding of edge services. OpenNESS will make it easier for cloud and internet of things developers to engage with a worldwide ecosystem of hardware, software and solutions integrators to develop new 5G and edge use cases and services.
We are showcasing our work with Rakuten* and how we’re helping with its pursuit of delivering the first fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network. Rakuten chose Intel architecture to help deliver this revolutionary approach and to accelerate wireless network innovation and capability. A programmable, high-performance network platform supports its strategy to diversify and grow its business. There will be more developments to come on this use case for a unified cloud-native infrastructure that can scale to meet the demands of almost any workload.
Our modems also play a significant role in moving 5G forward. In the important area of radio frequency (RF) front-end technology, we’re announcing our collaboration with Skyworks* to bring to market an RF front-end solution optimized for our 5G Intel® XMM™ 8160 modems. We’re also sharing news about, leading gateway providers adopting our Intel XMM 7560 modems with plans to move to our new Intel XMM 8160 5G modems by early 2020.
At Intel, we relentlessly focus on how we can help our customers and the industry to win in the highest growth areas. Intel is delivering data-centric infrastructure that moves data faster, stores more data, and processes any workload across cloud to core to edge and device to ignite innovation on the path to 5G. We deliver performance-leading products supporting a broad cross-Intel ecosystem that spans the entire data-centric market, accelerating the pace of innovation and delivering exciting new services and capabilities to the industry.
The 5G revolution is here – and along with our customers and partners, we’re charging forward.
Sandra Rivera is senior vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel Corporation.