Telecommunications equipment and software provider Ciena has said it is preparing for the evolution towards 5G by driving network resilience and performance through network function virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), as well as by encouraging network openness.
"5G in my mind is just scale of connections, devices; it's going to open up a lot more around machine to machine, and also the data analytics that can come from the network," Ciena VP Anthony McLachlan told ZDNet at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Tuesday.
"We have to tune and do different things to the network to get it ready [for 5G]. From a Ciena point of view, the underlying technology or network needs to be reliable, it's got to be open; I think it's very important to have an open ecosystem."
In adapting to the oncoming technology shift, McLachlan said the two biggest focuses for Ciena -- which provides optical transport links, Ethernet transport solutions, and underlying connectivity for telecommunications operators globally via presence across many subsea cables -- are resilience and performance via network virtualisation.
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