The Fabric's Insights on 5G

Prabakar Sundarrajan, The Fabric’s Chief Scientist on 5G for Verizon Ventures

How will 5G integration help propel your industry to new heights?

We are excited by the advent of 5G as it will create new opportunities for disruptive infrastructure innovation driven by new devices, new applications, and new mobile infrastructure deployments. 5G integration will enable cloud-based applications and infrastructure services to be delivered in new ways, with much less dependency on premise installed equipment.

We expect the mantra of ‘5G and go’ to take off, whereby end consumers, small businesses and campuses can avail of cloud-delivered services with just a 5G links rather than complex installations. When The Fabric co-created VeloCloud, we felt flexible, software-delivered wide area network services (SD-WAN) would rev up the migration of infrastructure services and applications to the cloud. We think that 5G integration will further accelerate that trend, also expanding opportunities for The Fabric co-created companies.”

What aspect of 5G is your company most excited about?

The Fabric is most excited about the improved last mile performance provided by 5G. The reduced latencies, increased bandwidth and the ability to finely slice and assurance bandwidth channels will enable The Fabric companies to deliver new services and also significantly improve delivery of existing services. The specific area that is most exciting is how 5G will enable applications and services to escape the shackles of data centers and cloud and be liberated to be delivered from the edge and serve ultra-mobility.”

Where do you see 5G in one year?

“We feel that the initial opportunities driven by 5G will be in the deployment of 5G infrastructure itself – the edge data centers, and security and performance of virtualized infrastructure services. Within one year, we feel there will be opportunities for 5G enabled edge delivered enterprise and managed services, including those for small businesses. We think we will also see the advent of the earliest availability of 5G equipped mobile devices, drones, etc. which will enable the early experimentation and R&D for disruptive innovations, which may take additional time to be matured and deployed.”

Read the blog post on 5G from Verizon Venture’s portfolio companies here.