The Rise of 5G and the NBN
Abstract
On 25 May 2021, TelSoc hosted the seventh Broadband Futures Forum, held online, to examine the relationship between 5G and Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN). Two speakers discussed opportunities arising from the 5G core architecture for service creation and delivery via the NBN. Several 5G-related services that could be offered by the NBN to be used by its retail service providers were outlined. Discussion following the speeches included questions about potential service characteristics, possibilities for automation, and deployment scenarios.
Introduction
The Broadband (formerly NBN) Futures Project (Holmes & Campbell, 2019) has been organizing a series of public forums under the title Broadband Futures to encourage debate, and potentially to build consensus, about the future of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) and a national broadband strategy (Holmes et al., 2020) for Australia. The seventh in the series, held on 25 May 2021, was entitled “The Rise of 5G” and provided some insight into ways in which 5G and the NBN could be complementary. Specifically, the forum was designed to address two questions:
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How does 5G represent an opportunity for the NBN to offer new wholesale services in addition to its existing layer-2 offerings?
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How can the NBN support the deployment of 5G services in Australia?
The forums are hosted by TelSoc (the Telecommunications Association Inc, publisher of this Journal). The first forum was held in July 2019 (Campbell & Milner, 2019), the second in October 2019 (Campbell, 2019), the third in February 2020 (Campbell, 2020a), the fourth in August 2020 (Campbell, Smith & Brooks, 2020), the fifth in November 2020 (Campbell, 2020b) and the sixth in March 2021 (Campbell, 2021).
The remainder of this paper summarizes the content of the Forum.
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