Why Can’t Mobility be More Like Ethernet?

Some now wonder why mobile network generations cannot more fully resemble the ways optical fiber transceiver development and Ethernet standards increase capacity over time. As optical transceivers moved through 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps to 100 Gbps, and Ethernet boosted speeds from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 100 Mbps, some argue the mobile infra platforms should likewise be able to gradually change out and upgrade transmission active elements in a more graceful way.

source: Lantronix

So as Ethernet standards move through variations that allow faster speeds and greater capacity, or fiber to X networks improve by swapping gear at the ends of the network, some believe the mobile industry would benefit from a more-scalable platform, as infrastructure cost climbs.

The difficulty would seem to be that mobile networks–at the access level–are inherently shared while fixed networks often can be designed as dedicated networks. The key difference is that fixed networks can dedicate capacity where mobile networks must share capacity at the access level (actual subscriber locations and devices).

Network slicing is a move towards dedicated capacity, but likely does not scale well enough to permit fully dedicated resources for most customers and devices.

Perhaps one might propose an extensible version of 5G that simply adds more spectrum support, and somehow manages to extend device density, latency performance and other capacity-increasing moves as allowing wider channels, adding more-robust channel aggregation and other moves that allow 5G to evolve more on the pattern of optical transceivers and Ethernet.